Black Widow's Eyes
by LilLolaBlue
Summary: Movie/Comic Hybrid. Natasha's a woman with a past. One that only Tony Stark knows about. And given his choice of deaths, he'll take a Black Widow over Whiplash, or poison, any day. Because love means never having to feel bad about blackmail. Right?
1. Love Me Two Times

**BLACK WIDOW'S EYES**

"Frightening the Horses"

_(Author's Note. This is a bit of a spinoff of an X-Men movie/comic hybrid called \ "Frightening the Horses". You don't need to read it to make sense of this story, though. if yo read this short intro. To square things between X-Men movieverse, Iron Man movieverse and Comicverse, as of 1985, Tony is 20, and in graduate school at Columbia University when he becomes friends with Jean Grey, 17, a chain-smoking, black-leather jacketed radical mutant rights activist and party girl in a Ramones tee shirt he meets when she crashes his private birthday party at CBGB's. She's a rebellious 17-year old genius who's looking to cheat on her saintly boyfriend, Scott Summers, with the X-Institute's infamous new combat instructor, Wolverine. He's holding out, for now, but Tony won't. Fast forward ten years. Dr. Jean Grey, sober and respectable, saved by the love of two good men, has recently married Scott Summers, which has sent Logan on an extended sabbatical for unknown reasons that just about anybody could figure out. Tony Stark , with whom she remains good friends, went cold turkey in a cave during the Persian Gulf War, from which he emerged, in 1991, as Iron Man. Two stints at rehab later. Tony's kicked the coke habit he used to freely admit to but still entertains the taste for speedballs he didn't, and considers himself a superbly functioning alcoholic. He's now officially too old to be Tony Stark, troubled, but handsome and dashing boy genius, and he's pretty sure he doesn't want to be Tony Stark, pathetic old skirt-chasing boozer who used to be somebody. He's 50% Iron Man, Knight in Slightly Tarnished armor, swashbuckling hero, and 50% Tony Stark, high-living, hard-charging playboy, and mad scientist plutocrat. Ten years after that? He may very soon be nothing but an inert mass of palladium suffused veiny flesh. Ouch. Verily, this IS the winter of Tony's discontent."_

**Chapter One: Love Me Two Times**

**I: Tony.**

**Los Angeles, California. 2010**

"You don't suppose it's just the drugs and the booze doing this, do you? Because I can lay off the drugs, anytime i want. I'm strictly a recreational user."

"What drugs?"

"Nothing serious. A little weed. Dexies for when I need to stay up for about a week or so. They're totally prescription, I get them from my doctor. Adderall is, like 75 percent dexedrine. And if I don't have ADHD, who does? Also Valium, you know, on occasion. When I've had too many dexies. Also prescription. And its' not as if I take them every day. And I think I've only done, like, three speedeballs in the past eight months, so, it's not a problem. I have to get Pepper to call my doctor. Find out if chlorophyll interacts with my other medications."

"You need to go back to rehab."

"For two speedballs in the last year? Look I went to rehab six, nine, eleven times or something between 1987 and 1994 and I just decided, fuck this. Rehab just makes me get pissed off and want to do more drugs. Drugs i haven't even tried yet. Honestly, I don't think I have this huge substance abuse problem that everyone thinks I do. i mean, alright, I admit it, i did have a really serious coke problem for about a decade, but I haven't touched the stuff since 1994. I mean, I grew up in the Village and, Vegas and LA in the seventies. I think I smoked my first joint when I was seven, or something. I know I had my first drink when I was seven. Maybe I smoked my first joint when I was nine. Or was that the year I lost my virginity? My point is, that certain substances have been a part of my life since I was still wearing Keds and overalls. My father and mother were both alcoholics, the old man as addicted to everything he could chew, shoot, snort or swallow, and the only person I know who's been to rehab as many times as I have was my stepfather, and compared to Mom and Dad, he might as well have been a narc. And I never had a serious drinking problem. Not compared with that coke habit, anyway. I mean, I'm a functional alcoholic. I don't drink when I'm working, I never get wasted at lunchtime. That last time at rehab was ridiculous. I did one tiny little speedball. One. I mean, it was my birthday, right? Right."

Tony pulled his gaze away from the infamously bright lights of LA, the Naked City, spread out beneath Stark Tower West, swiveled his chair around, ran his hand through his hair, straightened his tie and took a sip of his drink.

Across his massive desk, Natasha Romanova looked impassive.

"You died." She replied.

"No I didn't. Not technically."

"And it was my birthday. Not yours."

"So it was. Your 18th birthday. God, I was so in love with you. That's probably why I did it. I was so terrified. There I was, thirty years old, and in love for the first time with a 17 year old girl. So, do you think it's the drugs?" Tony asked.

"No. It's the palladium."

Tony began to scratch, with renewed vigor.

"Shit! My chest itches. It's not enough I'm slowly dying of heavy metal poisoning, it has to be itchy."

Tony reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a pill case made of platinum.

He popped a Valium and washed it down with a slug of really top notch Scotch, which was so good the taste of it wasn't ruined by a hint of chlorophyll.

Then he picked up his phone.

"Pepper? It's me. I want you to call that gentleman in Toronto about getting me some ludes...you don't have to shout...look if you don't call him, I'll fly to Canada, I'll fly to South Africa if I have to and get them, myself...No, I am not going back to rehab. I'm under a lot of stress about this thing in Monte Carlo and Valium isn't going to cut it. It's not my fault they quit making Quaaludes in this country. I have a prescription, sort of...I have to go. I have work to do, Potts...very funny. I'm hanging up, now."

Tony leapt to his feet, undid his tie and took off his jacket.

"Not to mention I haven't had sex in, I'm not sure, at least two months, because I can't expect any woman not to run, screaming, from this lovely labyrinth of poisoned veins radiating out of my chest. WE'll Jean wouldn't. But, I don't want Jean to know. It's getting lower, too. The itchy, veiny, purple thing. I cringe to think of just how far south this plague will spread. I definitely need some ludes."

"You can put your shirt back on, Tony. I don't feel nothing for you, anymore."

"Really? In that case, I'm taking my pants off, too."

"If you do that, I will shoot you."

Tony just laughed.

"If you don't feel anything for me, anymore, why did you take this assignment, Sasha?"

"Don't call me that! I needed a job, okay?"

"You have a job. You work for S.H.I.E.L.D. You're Nick Fury's _Bratva_ hatchet man. So, do you work under him nights, too?"

"Don't try to bait me. I don't want you to kill yourself, okay?"

"Why not?"

"Because, whether I like it or no, I owe you. I want to pay my debt and be done with it What about you? Why did you hire me? I know you recognized me."

"I recognized you five years ago when Nick Fury introduced me to Natasha Romanova, his latest wunderkind. I kept my mouth shut then, didn't I? And why shouldn't I hire you? I always knwe you'd come back to me. I wasn't about to turn you away when you did."

"I don't come back to you! This is my job. I'm only surprised Pepper didn't know me."

"To someone who doesn't know you all that well, Sasha, you look very different. And ten years is a long time. But, considering that I have licked almost every square inch of your body, you couldn't fool me."

He finally got a blush out of her.

That was a good sign.

"There is some hope. Also good reason for you to make another trip to the MORC and dry up. Unless you keep on the way you are, drinking like fish, popping pills, the poison will not kill you. Your father will be a hundred and one, this year. And he doesn't look a day over thirty-five. But with the poison and your drinking and you and your occasional speedball? You won't last two months. "

"My stepfather."

"Oh no. Like you say about me, Tony. I know you too well. He's your father."

The Black Widow got up, smoothed out the skirt of her suit, put on her jacket and spun, crisply on her heel.

"Now I make first move. Out of door. Good night, Mr. Stark."

Tony waited until she got to the door of his office.

"I still love you, Sasha. Shouldn't that at least entitle me to a fast blowjob? It's not as if it would be the first time. And I'm goddamn horny and so completely unfulfilled by all this compulsive masturbation. I'm sure, it would only take me about two minutes to come. Five minutes, tops."

Natasha paused but she didn't turn around.

"What if I promised not to come in your mouth? What if I pay you, extra, this week? Double overtime."

That did the trick.

She spun around on her high heels and stalked back to where Tony was leaning against his desk.

He finished his drink.

"Fuck you! Go to hell, you bastard!" Natasha shouted.

"Triple?" Tony asked

She moved to deliver a rabbit punch to his temple, and Tony blocked the blow.

"Alright, we can renegotiate. You don't have to touch me. You don't even have to look at me. Just let me go down on you, and I'll jack off. You can sit in my chair. I'll be under the desk the whole time, and I'll buy you car. Whatever car you want. A Bentley. A Rolls. A 1938 V-8 Ford driven by Clyde Barrow. Anything."

The whole point was, Natasha was now close enough to Tony that he could kiss her.

She pushed him away, slapped him the face and said some very nasty things to him in Russian, then she walked out the door.

Tony poured himself another drink, and drank about half of it.

He smoothed out his hair, flicked a piece of lint off the arc reactor, ran his tongue across his teeth to make sure there was nothing stuck on them, took off his rings and his wristwatch, adjusted his package and then began to count backwards.

"Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…"

The Black Widow burst back into his office.

She locked the door and used a device in her iPhone to turn off the security cameras.

Even the secret ones.

She didn't have her jacket on, anymore, and she no longer appeared to be composed.

Sash kicked off her shoes, and in the same motion as she approached Tony, drew a snub-nosed but still terribly lethal .357 hand cannon out of a holster in her bra, cocked the hammer and jammed the barrel against Tony's head.

"If you tell a single living soul about this, ever, so long as you live, I will kill you. Slowly. I will shoot you five times, in most painful places possible, and let you bleed almost to death before I sit on your chest and strangle the life out of you with my bare hands, you son of a bitch!"

"Who am I going to tell?"

Tony kissed her again, and Natasha dropped the gun on the floor, and kissed him back.

As he unrolled her thigh-highs, Tony thought of three little words.

_In like Flynn_.

He almost laughed, but he didn't.

After all, he only had a few months, maybe even only a few weeks to live.

This may be the last time.


	2. She Was Just Seventeen

**Chapter Two: She Was Just Seventeen**

**New York City, 1994**

**I: Tony**

Thirty.

This is what thirty looks like.

Oh, you may _seem_ like the same man you were last month, when you were 29.

When you were still in your late 20's.

Before you became thirty.

Officially too old to live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.

Now you get to be a charmingly world-weary debaucher, a wry degenerate with a smile on his face, a girl on his arm, and a drink in his hand.

Like your father.

No, no not like him.

Like your stepfather.

Much better.

Sure, you can still score with 17 and 18 year old coeds, and, well, mask groupies like it in the suit, but no matter how you slice the pie, or how many slices of pie you're still getting, it doesn't change the fact that you're still 30.

Thirty.

Tony was answering questions from a throng of students after giving a lecture at Columbia University trying his best not to act or feel THIRTY, when his entire life as he had known it to that point, stopped.

It was like being struck by lightning, it was the thunderbolt.

All of the sudden, Logan wasn't a fool anymore, and he understood very other fool he ever met who went crazy over a woman, because he had suddenly joined them.

It was the thunderbolt, alright.

Tony could smell the ozone in the air.

She came out of the crowd on long legs that were slender at the calf and ample at the thigh, long dark red hair and almond-shaped blue-grey eyes, high cheekbones and full pink lips, hugging her books against a gravity-defying set of tits, stacked over an hourglass waist that flared at the hips.

Her accent was exotic, Tony recognized it at once as Russian.

God in Heaven, only Russian girls were built like that.

He was already her willing fool, her devoted slave, he was tongue tied and slack jawed and stupefied.

This was it, she was the most perfect, most beautiful girl in the world.

Her glasses and the sweater she wore over a button down shirt spoke of her studiousness and her dedication to her work, and the schoolgirl-ish skirt added to the overall picture of scholarly innocence and seriousness.

Tony found himself speaking to her in Russian, and when they were able to bridge the gap of her halting English, the sheer complexity and sophistication of the question she asked him made him realize he was talking to a fellow genius.

She wasn't like every other empty-headed wench he'd laid down with in his life; she was his second chance, his perfect mate, the girl of his dreams.

Even her accent was intoxicating; she had a lovely contralto voice that sounded sweet and exotic as she spoke to him in a rush of mixed Russian and English.

Tony said a very serious and heartfelt prayer to any gods that might be listening that this beautiful creature liked to fuck.

* * *

><p>By the stroke of midnight that night, Tony had discovered that her name was Natasha Romanova Karamazov, like in the Dostoevsky novel, and that she had been born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, again, and moved to Moscow at 11, , and that she had a minor in physics and a major in mechanical engineering.<p>

She was an orphan, attending Columbia on a series of grants and scholarships for exceptional students, & she lived in an efficiency apartment in the East Village.

Her English was poor because she had only been in the country six months and didn't speak a word before.

And?

And she did indeed seem inordinately fond of fucking, having spent the past hour or so gasping very dirty things to Tony in Russian.

She also smoked.

Chain-smoked, actually.

Sasha was in the process of lighting one cigarette on the butt end of another as she fixed Tony with a thoughtful expression.

"I never met man like you. I can't say in English without sounding like whore."

"A lot of women tell me that. But I never met a girl like you."

Sasha laughed.

"You say that to all girls, yes?"

"I do. But I never meant it, before."

* * *

><p>"This is non-negotiable, Pepper. Completely non-negotiable."<p>

"Tell me you're not serious! Tell me you and your crazy stepfather went and got insanely drunk, and you're not sober enough now to make sense."

"You're not making sense, Pepper. My stepfather died. I get insanely drunk with my stepbrother, now."

"Tony, I know all about your stepfather, and how he's posing as Robert Blood the second and who he was before he started posing as Robert Blood the first. I am not an idiot."

"I am also not an idiot. Frankly, Potts, I'm stumped. All I ever hear from you is about my refusal to take any relationship seriously. I tell you I'm madly in love and I want to set my girlfriend up in a nice apartment and get her some new clothes and an English tutor and just a basically insignificant car and set up a little bank account for her, and you act like I'm violating the Geneva Convention."

Pepper dropped a stack of files on Tony's desk.

"Does Jean know about this?"

"Yes. I spoke to Jean this morning. Which means I've already heard everything you're about to I already told Sasha about my Wednesday appointment with Jean and she's totally fine with it."

"Of course she is. Because she's some gold-digging teenage tart of a Russian Lolita who is at best trying to take you for a ride and at worst may be some kind of assassin, or spy! I am calling Steve. I'm having this girl checked out."

"I called Steve, too."

"Really? What did he have to say?"

"The same thing Jean did. The same thing you're saying. But I don't care. I'm in love."

"What did Flynn say?"

"My stepfather?"

"Your stepfather."

"He said not to move her in with me, put her on a fixed income, buy her a new VW before she asks me for a Porsche and not to get married without an ironclad prenup."

"I might have known you didn't come up with any of that by yourself. Fine. I'll do it. I'll arrange everything. But when it blows up in your face, don't come crying to me!"

* * *

><p>Later on that day, Iron Man got a non-business visit from Captain America.<p>

"All I'm saying, Tony, is that, don't you think you're moving a little too fast?"

"See, that's your problem, Steve. You're still so forties. When did you get thawed? Somewhere in the seventies?"

"1964. And what would you know about the seventies? You were ten in 1975!"

"Yes, but I was 13 in 1978. And make no mistake, I was a man when I was 13. It was my first year at Columbia. Hell, I was a man when I was ten. On a regular basis, too."

"And you were a cokehead by the time you were 20."

"15. Everyone got a coke habit in the 80's. I went to rehab, didn't I?"

"Ten times! Ten times between 1987 and now!"

"It worked, eventually. I haven't touched coke, or any other drugs since 1991. Well, not hardly."

"But you're still a drunk."

"I am not. I am a functional alcoholic, and, as such, I do not need to go to rehab. I'm on the S.H.I.E.L.D Moderation Program."

"You only have three drinks a day? Right. Sure you do."

"Only three drinks during the _work_ day. So I modified it a little bit? What do you want, I grew up in the Village and in LA during the 70's! I started drinking when I was eight, I smoked my first joint at seven and I lost my virginity when I was ten! Who the fuck do you think I am, anyway, Steve? Clark Kent? Like I said. You're so forties."

"The forties have nothing to do with it! There were lots of guys like you around in the forties. Your father was one of them. Both your father, and your stepfather, come to think of it. My point is, I spend more time explaining to CNN and a lot of less reputable journalists, about what it is you're doing in all these videos you can buy on the Internet for ten bucks without your pants on to some girl, or two girls, or what they are doing to you and just how old they are, than I do discussing any important Avengers initiatives. And now you're in love with one of them?"

"Sasha is not a groupie. She's a student at Columbia. She's brilliant."

"Brilliant. Brilliant and Russian and poor. Think, Tony. Forget all about the idea she might be an assassin, even though that's possible. Did you ever think about industrial espionage?"

"I have thought about all of that. I'm in love, I didn't have a lobotomy. That's why she's getting her own place, her own car, and her own bank account. Damage control. At least until I get to know her better."

"What I'm saying just isn't filtering into your head, is it, Tony?"

"Not really. Steve, it's 1995. Not 1945. Men do things like this all the time for girls."

"They did it all the time in 1945, too. And it came back to bite them on their asses, all the time."

"Well, excuse me if I want out of the rat race! You don't know what it's like in the old dating pool, do you? You've been with the same woman since 1978! Forget New York girls. They come in two varieties. Snobby, skinny, coked-up, fucked-out, junkie hipster harlots, who nod out while you're on top of them, and outrageous Jersey style sluts, who videotape themselves petting their pussy in the bathtub, let alone getting it from anyone remotely connected with celebrity. And out here in LA? Its' a freak show. It's all fish lips and rock hard, ice cold breast implants, and freshly waxed, collaged injected pussies. Not even a landing strip. All a man can do is buy more rubbers, and pray that's razorburn and not herpes scars. And they don't do it because they just want to. Nobody does, anymore. Except for geeks and freaks and groupies. I mean, for meeting women, work used to be a good place. God, I miss the eighties. And the seventies, for that matter."

"Tony, listen to me. I'm your best friend. Look, I'm not asking you to become a priest. But, look at me. I have one girlfriend. The same girlfriend I've had since, well, 1980. Women throw themselves at me, too. I did an interview with the _Village Voice_, and the dame who wrote it up said, in the article, that she kept looking at me, and imagining I must be a real blond, and about how I must have fabulous golden thighs. That was embarrassing. Bernie threw me out of my own bedroom for a week."

"Did you fuck the reporter?"

"Hell, no! And it took me a long time to convince Bernie of that. I get the feeling I'm the exception to the rule."

"Well, I fucked her. What was her name?"

"I don't remember."

"Neither do I. My point is, everybody fucked her, but you. You didn't do it because you are so very forties."

Tony looked pleased with himself, having proved his initial point.

"What the hell would you know about the forties? You weren't there! Your father was, though. He had your philosophy. He also had three wives. Your mother was wife number four. He was one of my best friends and Howard confided in me that the way he ignored your mother for every other woman in town, he wouldn't be surprised if Flynn was your father, or be angry with your mother for it."

"Flynn who?"

"Tony, please. You know I know all about this. Flynn and Eddie Blake and I go drinking, together, at least once a month."

"Sorry, Steve. Force of habit."

"No, that would be force of whiskey, when you don't remember that your best friend and your stepfather have known each other since 1942! You call that being a functional alcoholic? Bullshit!"

"I have heard this before, Steve. A million times."

"You think that since it's Flynn's blood in your veins, you're invincible. We'll he very nearly wasn't. And you're not, either."

"I have no idea who's blood is in my veins. Mom didn't. Dad didn't. Flynn doesn't, either."

"Well, otherwise, that leaves Howard as your Dad, then, doesn't it? The man who invented the casting couch! And him and Flynn, they were good buddies. Cut from the same cloth."

"You shouldn't say that in public. Flynn's been very careful about constructing his new identity."

"Flynn? Horseshit! He's never been careful with anything in his life! And neither was Howard! Neither of them really gave a shit who knew what! Why would Howard Stark make Robert Blood, the journalist, his son's legal guardian? And let's talk about that one, shall we? First, Flynn was Robert Blood, which happened to be Errol Flynn's code name as a S.H.I.E.L.D agent. Then, after Nick and Eddie loosed him on the world again, he became a journalist, explorer and adventurer. Now he's Robert Blood, Jr., who's the same, but with a website and works for CNN. Meanwhile, he makes no attempt to look any different. At all! Careful? Flynn bought his house back from his ex-wife, and moved into it in 1968 with the same girl he supposedly died on in 1959!"

"Actually, my father bought his house back for him. And I've got a lot of fond memories of Mulholland Farm house. It was the first real home I ever had. And Flynn was pretty much the only actual parent I ever had. From the time I was a little kid. Dad and Mom tried, but they were both terrible. I spent every winter of my life, there, until I bought my place in Malibu."

"Your life boggles the mind, Tony."

"So? Come on, Steve! Who really believes that Errol Flynn was an X-Factor mutant? Let alone a teleporter and partial metamorph with moderate healing ability who was secretly a S.H.I.E.L.D agent who got yanked for bad behavior in 1959, only to resurface in 1968 as Robert Blood, and then again, as Robert Blood, junior? Besides conspiracy whack jobs?"

"Who does? What about half of Hollywood? How about all the people who went to that two-week Satyricon of a 85th birthday party he threw for himself last year?"

"Techincally, Robert Blood, Jr., threw a 85th birthday party for Errol Flynn, the man who built Mulholland Farm, the estate he inherited from his father, Robert Blood, Sr. And you're leaving some things out of your history. I lost my father when I was 13. Even before that, Flynn was more of a father to me than Dad ever was. Then, when I was in my twenties, I found out that my Dad pulled the plug on my stepdad, and made him do 10 years in the S.H.I.E.L.D deep cover salt mines before he was allowed to be Errol Flynn again, and salvage something of his career! That was one hell of a payment Howard exacted from Flynn for being a better father than he was, and a little bad behavior. If you had a childhood like mine, you might have to take a few drinks, too."

"Bad behavior? A little bad behavior? In 1959, Flynn was running around with a 17 year old girl, making promises the USA wasn't going to keep to Fidel Castro! When Eddie finally put the arm on him in Vancouver, he had a gram of heroin in one sock, reefers in his cigarette case, and a condom filled with cocaine hidden in his underwear!"

"You sound upset about that."

"He thought it was funny. Just like you do. I didn't laugh when he told me about it while I was still in the hospital in 1964. Tony, you're making my point for me. Your father was a flawed man who loved you and tried to do right by you, but didn't always set a good example for you, and let you run wild because he didn't know what to do with you. Your stepfather is a flawed man who loves you and tried to do right by you, but , like you say, you were a grown man at 13 when he got custody of you and the best he could do was see to it you didn't kill yourself with your wildness. And now you meet this girl, who reminds you of yourself, when you were her age, and you want to save her. All I'm saying, Tony, is, please, look before you leap."

**II: Natasha**

One thing Sasha Karamazov had in common with Tony Stark, besides her intelligence, was that she had to grow up fast, and had made no time or place in her life for sentiment.

In 1988, in the waning days of the Soviet Union, Natasha's physicist father, Roman Nikolayevich Karamazov who did some kind of research work work for the party, was arrested.

Sasha did not ever expect to see him again; he had been arrested in secret by the KGB, not by the police.

Roman, himself had no link to his mother and father other than his name.

They had also been scientists, and had vanished into the gulag archipelago when their son was just a boy.

He had grown up in a state orphans' home, and his wife, also named Natasha, also a physicist, had defected to the UK with some British bureaucrat, so long ago that her daughter didn't remember her any more than Roman remembered his parents.

Sasha would have also vanished into some orphans' home had it not been for her father's junior research partner, Ivan Vanko, and his ageing, disgraced father, Anton.

Dr. Karamazov had been a protégé of Anton Vanko, and he gave a job to Ivan Vanko, who was 13 years older than Sasha, of an age to be her older brother.

Roman had devoted his life to the furtherance of his mentor's research, and to see to it that the credit stolen from him by Howard Stark would one day be restored.

Dr. Karamazov gave his life for his cause, and Ivan vowed to repay his sacrifice by seeing to it that his daughter, Sasha, followed in Dr. Karamazov's footsteps.

Unlike her father, a reedy, tall, man with a quiet voice and large glasses, Ivan didn't look like a Doctor of Physics.

He was also tall, but muscular and burly and covered in gulag-style tattoos.

Ivan looked like he was a member of the Bratva, the Russian mafia, which in fact, is what he became after the KGB arrested his partner.

One day, Ivan came to get her at school.

He hurried her into a van, driven by a man she did not know, and explained that everything they had was in the van, and they would be moving to Moscow.

In Moscow, they moved in with Ivan's father, Anton, in his flat over the neighborhood store where he worked as an unassuming cashier.

It was a small flat, consisting of a bedroom, a little living room, a bathroom, a kitchenette, and a tiny, narrow, cubbyhole of a room that the couple who had been Anton's most recent flatmates had used as a room for their baby.

Anton kept his bedroom, in which all three of them kept their clothes, Ivan slept on the couch, and Ivan got a chair for Sasha that folded down to become a single bed, and a desk, which they put in the little room.

That left Sasha with about a foot of clearance; it was a good thing that the door to the little room opened out.

There were three things valued in the little flat.

Education, family, and revenge.

Anton and Ivan both made sacrifices so that Sasha could have a uniform for school, and they were strict about her not only doing her homework, but completing extracurricular lessons.

Ivan also taught Sasha how to fight, not like a girl in the schoolyard, but like a man in a prison-yard.

He taught her not only the use of her fists, but how to use a rope, a knife ,and a gun.

Ivan told her that the only way to survive was to be harder than life was.

From both men she learned that the author of all their misery was the late Howard Stark, and to transfer the vendetta on to his arrogant, over-privileged son, Tony.

By the time she was 14, Sasha was a grown woman, entering university, who knew at least ten different ways to a kill a grown man twice her size.

Around that time, she stopped looking at Ivan as an older brother, and she began sleeping with him on the fold-out couch in the main room.

Ivan always told her that she was his greatest weapon, that someday he would send her to America, he would find a way, and then she could destroy Tony Stark in a way he and his father never could have.

He said that would be the ultimate sacrifice.

Sasha was 16 when the bottom fell out of her life, again.

Ivan was betrayed by an associate, arrested, tried, and sentenced to 15 to 25 years at hard labor in a Siberian prison.

Sasha waited for the man to be let out of police custody, hunted him down, killed him, slowly. with her fists and her feet and a a knife, and sliced off both his ears.

She gave them to Ivan during his last days in Moscow, before he was to be transferred to Siberia.

Anton, who was no stranger to Siberian exile, was going with his son; he could get a job in the town nearest the prison, to work to support his boy.

They both refused to allow Sasha to go with them; she was to stay in the flat in Moscow, finish her education, and find a way to carry out the vendetta.

For Anton, for Ivan, for her own father.

Whose body lay unquiet, in some unhallowed grave.

Sasha took a job as a waitress at a café across the street to earn a little extra money, continued her tenure at university, and kept her eyes peeled for opportunity.

Which came in the form of a harsh, grating American weapons maker.

A flashy, annoying little man named Justin Hammer.

She knew some men, former associates of Ivan's, who knew some associates of Mr. Hammer's, and arranged a meeting.

Sasha offered her services to Hammer Industries, and her knowledge of the continuing research into the Iron Man technology, in exchange for a student visa and a transfer to Columbia University, and Hammer's payment of her fees for college and her graduate work.

She sweetened the pot with Ivan's scheme.

She would seduce Tony Stark, make him fall in love with her, and then, when she was sure she had his trust, his love, and his heart, she would abandon him.

At the very least it would cause him to spiral into a relapse and end up in rehab, which would give Hammer an edge over his rival.

At the most, he might even overdose, or commit suicide.

Justin Hammer was incredibly enthused.

He had seen evidence of her brilliance from Ivan's associate, and proof that she had been tutored by the Vankos.

The ruin of Tony Stark was just icing on the cake.

He agreed to bankroll Sasha all the way to a Ph.D, and offer her a job every summer working for Hammer, after the ruin of his rival was complete.

Sasha was a hard-hearted woman.

She was an orphan at 11, a woman at 14, a killer at 17, the protégé of a bitter, mean old man and the lover of his fanatically devoted scientist turned hardened gangster son.

She did not believe she possessed a soul, let alone a heart.

You hear, of course, that there is a kind of love that is like a thunderbolt, that it strikes with the sizzling mortality of a bolt of lightning, the kind of wild, thoughtless, improbably love that seizes hold of you the first moment you meet someone, and refused to release you until you are released by death.

Sasha saw that thunderbolt strike Tony Stark, but it must have refracted off of the arc reactor in his chest, because she felt it hit her, too.

At first, she refused to admit that such a thing had happened.

But it was hard not to like Tony, let alone fall in love with him.

He was charming, in a sharp, mean-spirited, cynical way that reminded her very much of Ivan, and also rather funny.

He was also a scientist of great intelligence; Sasha told herself this was how and why they were able to get along so well.

Not to mention she hadn't had much even when she was a child, and since she was 11, she had next to nothing.

Tony moved her into an apartment that was twice the size of Anton's, maybe more; the bathroom alone was bigger than the room in which she had lived for six years.

He bought her a car and got her a tutor to help her speak and read English better, and opened a bank account in her name.

The amount he kept in it was a pittance to him, but it was more money than anyone Sasha had ever personally known possessed in all her life.

That accounted for her feeling of gratitude towards the enemy; any dog wags his tail at a kind master, no matter how much he hates all mankind from the abuse of that master's fellow men.

The fact that she enjoyed their sex life, that was also easily explained away.

Sasha was no prude; she liked sex and she liked men, and she had not had the time or the luxury of finding another man after Ivan was jailed.

Tony was tall, and well-built and he had a good body, with hair on his chest.

He wasn't just good-looking, he was handsome like a movie-star was handsome, and there was a certain un-nameable thing about him, a madness in his blue eyes, a twinkling, gleeful lust for life, like a sea captain in an old black and white pirate movie with, what was his name, on the black and white movies on TV late at night, yes, Errol Flynn, in it.

Not to mention that Tony was well-served by his reputation as a great lover; he could have made a frigid lesbian nun into a raving nymphomaniac in about twenty-six minutes.

The man was also hung like a stallion and had the stamina of a Borgia bull, and he knew exactly what to do with both.

Any woman would have enjoyed a good, dirty fuck from Tony Stark.

More unsettling, it was plain that Tony wasn't the kind of man who believed in or expected true love to fall into his life, as much as Sasha was a very practical young woman who didn't believe in fairy tale romances.

Still, less than a week after he met her, he told her that he had never been in love with a woman before and didn't plan on ever falling in love, but, nonetheless he was, in his words "truly, madly deeply, stupidly" in love with her.

After a month had passed, Sasha was forced to admit to herself that she liked Tony, and that she enjoyed his company.

In many ways he was the man that Ivan had described to her, a narcissistic, spoilt, shallow, morally bankrupt grasping capitalist dog who was a whoremonger and a degenerate alcoholic, to boot.

But Tony was also a idealistic scientist with Promethean visions of a better future through a combination of democracy, capitalism and technology, one that he put his body and soul on the line for what he believed every time he put on his armor.

He believed in Stark Enterprises' new initiaves, in the Avengers, and above all, in Iron Man.

Indeed, Tony was fond of saying that he wasn't aware he had a heart before he got a hole in it, from which arose Iron Man.

And Tony was far more complicated, even tortured, than Ivan and Anton could have imagined.

If they really were victims of Howard Stark, they would have to take a number and stand in line behind his son.

Tony was a mad, merry dynamo of a man much of the time, but he was given to the occasional drunken fit of deep and agonizing melancholy, which sprung from a well of pain that was painstakingly dug by the late, great Howard Stark.

Howard Stark was in his sixties, and a wealthy industrialist, scientist and movie mogul when he married an Argentine woman of Irish and Spanish decent, Maria Moon.

She was an author and playwright in her twenties, living in Greenwich Village in a loft with journalist, war correspondent and adventurer Robert Blood, who depending on what you believed, was in his forties, or was the secret X-factor mutant, deep-cover S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, and matinee idol Errol Flynn.

Flynn was an old friend of Howard's since the thirties, and Blood and Howard had been friends since the late fifties, Howard claimed.

Howard married Maria because she was carrying his child, the only one of four Mrs. Starks to manage that feat.

Tony pointed out, however that considering his mother's relationship with Blood, no one, not even Howard, himself, was sever 100 per cent sure which of the two men were Tony's father.

Howard had never been the best husband and he wasn't about to start now; he alternately doted over and neglected Maria and cheated on her, incessantly, which drive her into the arms of her old beau, and deeper into the bottle of vodka she never quite crawled out of.

Until Tony was eight, he lived with his mother and Robert Blood at the brownstone in the Village, and, occasionally, his father, too.

That year, 1973, Maria mother drove into a telephone pole in Brooklyn at about 60 miles an hour; Howard, who was in the passenger seat, was left with a limp for the rest of his life.

Tony, sitting in the back, was unharmed except for a few bumps and bruises.

Maria was killed on impact.

Tony recalled that both of his parents were drunk, and that at the time of the crash, he was sneaking a drink from the bottle of expensive Scotch rolling around in the back seat.

Howard and Maria were having an argument.

He blamed himself for his wife's death.

For the next four years, Howard Stark, always a bit of a bizarre man, came apart at the seams.

He didn't send his son to school, rather he home-schooled Tony and they holed up on the top floor of the Stark Hotel and Casino is Las Vegas.

Howard's hair turned white almost overnight, and he let it grow long and scraggly.

He was always drinking, and popping prescription pills, and although he never let Tony touch his medications, he never stopped the boy from drinking, and had his minions buy his son cigarettes.

Howard had been a stranger to his son for eight years, and for the last four years of his life the only time they were apart was when Howard let his son leave, for one or two weeks at a time, with his trusted friend Robert Blood.

Other than that, Tony was a virtual prisoner in his suite across the hall from Howard's; the only person he ever saw other than his father and his father's minions was the daughter of his father's last girlfriend, who was a year older than him.

Tony got very emotional when he talked about Tessa; she was the first person he ever got high with, the first girl he ever made love to, and his only friend for four very disturbing and bizarre years.

While Tony was in LA, at Mulholland Farm with Robert Blood, Howard drove his car into a telephone pole at about 100 miles an hour and killed himself, his faded ex-starlet girlfriend, and Tessa.

He left ten million dollars, Mulholland Farm, and a brownstone in Greenwich Village to Robert Blood and made him Tony's guardian.

The rest went to Tony, who went to USC as an undergraduate and lived with his stepfather, and then Columbia for his graduate work, and returning to LA in the summer.

He became Dr. Anthony Edward Stark at the age of 21, and became an international playboy, bon vivant, captain of industry, brilliant scientist and a member of the Jet Set.

A somebody.

A celebrity.

A Modern demi-God, whom mere mortals liked to read about in People magazine, and, sometimes, in the Globe and that National Enquirer.

When he wasn't working, Tony lived his life in a combination of a glitzy dream and an alcoholic twilight, passing from car to care and plane to plane and city to city and party to party and event to event, living his fabulous, monied bi-coastal lifestyle, in Malibu and Greenwich Village, having only three or four people in that life who genuinely cared if he lived or died, and Tony wasn't in that number, himself.

Sure, it was a good life and he had a good time, but it had its price.

One not payable in wads of cash that he couldn't charm, bullshit, or even reason his way out of.

His first stint at rehab was in 1987, then again in 1989, and he went cold turkey in a cave in the desert during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

Since 1991 Tony had been drug-free, and by drug-free he meant that he did not habitually use hard drugs every day, or anything.

But he had to have a little fun, every once in awhile, right?

His drinking was the elephant in the living room.

Tony was emphatically and admittedly still a drunk, or as he termed it, a functional alcoholic.

Tony saw nothing wrong with his drinking as long as he didn't drink while he was working, and he didn't get blackout drunk more than once a month.

Maybe twice.

Considering his parents' history, he always had his chauffeur, Happy, drive him around when he'd had a few too many, and thus, all was right in his world.

Or at least, in his mind.

Most of Tony's stories about his unusual family life, and growing up during the Age of Aquarius in the "modern equivalents of Sodom and Gomorrah" even the bizarre years with his bizarre father, were funny and entertaining and he didn't sound at all like he considered his life to have been miserable, bad or awful.

It was only when he was drunk and melancholy, twice in the month Sasha had known him, that the less merry tales came out, and with them a great outpouring of bitter blood from the wounds Howard Stark had made in his son's soul.

Sasha told him her own story, and she didn't make up false names for Ivan and Anton Vanko, she just didn't mention their connection.

Tony had genuinely never heard of either man.

Natasha regularly kept in touch with Justin Hammer, something she despised, and still wrote to Ivan and Anton.

They knew she had made it to America, but she didn't tell them about her project.

Especially not now that she was beginning to genuinely believe that Tony was as much Howard's victim as they were, and deserved none of their hatred.

She was at war with herself about her feelings for Tony, and the nature of her project.

The battle came to a head on her 18th birthday, when she waited for Tony in the coffee shop across the street from her apartment for two hours and he never came.

Tony was never more than fifteen minutes late without calling.

And he had made plans he wouldn't tell her about for her birthday, certainly, he wouldn't be late, tonight.

She drove to his brownstone in the Village, and found the front door unlocked.

Tony wasn't in his deep basement workshop, or anywhere else she looked, until she checked the master bathroom.

She found him floating in his bathtub, naked.

His skin was a pale grayish color, and his lips were bluish.

There was a puddle of expensive Scotch on the floor that had spilled from the bottle still loosely grasped in Tony's hand, and there was also a needle sticking out of his left arm.

The water was cold and so was Tony, and the arc reactor only gave off the faintest of pale blue glows.

Sasha did not panic.

Tony had given her Pepper Potts' phone number for when he was in trouble, Captain America's personal phone number, for when he was in serious trouble and his stepfather's, for when he was in life-threatening trouble.

She called Robert Blood's cell phone, and, in a slow, clear fashion, hoping that he would not be confused by her accent over the telephone, explained exactly who she was and what the problem was.

She hadn't even hung up her phone before there was a loud popping noise in the room, like a champagne cork popping out of a bottle, a flash of light and a puff of wind, and there was Robert Blood.

Sasha supposed that, this time, the conspiracy theory was absolutely right.

"You won't put this on the Internet, will you, love?" Mr. Flynn asked.

Sasha helped him get Tony out of the bathtub.

"I am Russian. I know how to unsee things, and keep mouth shut." Sasha confirmed.

He told Sasha to put her arm around his waist and she didn't ask why, and then there was another pop and flash and puff and they were in some kind of hospital, in which one of the doctors was Tony's longtime "friend with benefits" Jean Grey, and the other doctor was large, blue, furry and wore wire-rimmed glasses.

Sasha assumed they were at the X-Mansion.

It wasn't until the blue furry man, Beast, Sasha thought his name was, and Jean had Tony on a gurney and they were attaching hoses and wires and machines to him, shouting and scurrying around that the enormity of the situation hit Sasha, and she began to cry.

Sasha had cried when her father died, and when the jury found Ivan guilty, and those were the only times.

"For fuck's sake, Flynn, the kid doesn't need to see the dumb son of a bitch die! Get her the fuck out of here!" Jean Grey ordered.

Sasha found herself in the odd position of spending the next half-hour weeping helplessly in the arms of a stranger who wasn't even supposed to be alive.

But, Mr. Flynn was kind to her; he seemed to be a good man, and he was after all, Tony's father one way or another, after all.

Two or three hours went by, and Mr. Flynn, or as he insisted she call him, Flynn, was distracting her with a tall tale that she thought the craziest thing about was that it was probably 90 percent true when Dr. Grey came through the double doors.

"Well, he's alive. Most people, when they sat they occasionally do drugs, nothing serious, they mean they smoke a joint, every once in awhile. Apparently, when Tony says it, he means he shoots speedballs, now and then, after he's already drank a bottle of Scotch."

"What?" Natasha asked.

Jean explained what a speedball was, and Sasha swore in Russian.

"What did she say, Flynn?"

"Something like how could a man as smart as Tony be such a stupid fucking bastard?"

"I have been wondering that for years. He's alive, and he's awake, and you know Tony. He's very cheerful about the whole thing, he says it was only an accident, he was just starting celebrating his girlfriend's birthday, early, and he wants to go home. Naturally I called Cap. The only place he's going is in for another 30 days at the MORC in San Diego."

Jean explained that was the Masked Operative Rehabilitation Center which was basically a hospital, sanatorium, detention center and detox facility for superheroes, run by S.H.I.E.L.D.

Then she said that she could see him.

Sasha hadn't intended to rush to Tony's bedside weeping and screaming, both sad and happy and angry all at once, shouting at him in a mixture of English and Russian, but that's what she did.

She took her finals a month early, passed and spent the next 30 days in a suite at a hotel Tony owned in San Diego, and went to see him every day at the MORC, for two hours, the maximum time she was allowed.

One morning, a letter came to her from New York that had come from Siberia.

It was from Anton.

Ivan was dead.

He had been killed trying to escape from prison, and had taken three armed guards with him.

Sasha kept reading the same passage, over and over again.

"Now they are all dead. Your father, my son, that son of a bitch Howard Stark. Let them stay dead. My son is dead and your father is dead because I would not let my grudge against Howard die with the bastard. He was a cold, calculating, totalitarian son of a bitch that only Stalin could have loved. I am not surprised that his son bears deep scars from having such a father. Maybe the boy is blameless. Maybe he is not. But I do not want to see any more ruin and death at that bastard's hands. I am an old man, and soon I will follow my son to the grave. Let my grudge die with me. Take the opportunity Howard's son wants to give you. Live your life."

Sasha was so melancholy that Tony noticed and she couldn't conjure a smile to paste over her misery.

"Ivan is dead. Anton has lost will to live. Now I am alone." She admitted.

Saying it so matter-of-factly made it terribly true, and Sasha felt the cold hand of Death steal over her, squeezing all the blood and the warmth out her heart in her chest.

"You've got me, Sasha." Tony reminded her

"I do not deserve you." She replied.

Sasha wrote back to Anton and the day before Tony was released, her letter came back return to sender.

She was more melancholy than ever.

How could she start a new life based on lies and betrayal?

And if she told Tony the truth, how could she make him believe her?

The night of Tony's release, they spent what even a committed atheist like Sasha would have termed a magical night together, at his Malibu home.

After Tony fell asleep, Natasha wrote him a long letter, went into the master bathroom, opened the window and threw herself out, down towards the sea.

**III: Pepper**

When Pepper Potts drove up towards the house she noticed that Tony's bathroom window was open.

That was odd, considering most of the windows of his palace by the sea were not designed to be opened, at all.

When she got out of the car, she saw the limp body laying spread out across the roof of the main wing of the mansion.

Pepper was running towards the house when she saw Tony, in his Iron Man suit, fly out the bathroom window, and pick the girl up.

He flew down to Pepper

"She's still alive. Maybe I shouldn't have moved her, but I couldn't leave her on the roof."

"Did she fall?"

"No. There was a note. But nobody else will ever know that, alright, Potts?"

"Alright. I'm calling 911."

Tony didn't go in the ambulance with the girl; he said he needed to get out of the suit and would follow them, later.

Pepper knew that was bullshit, and followed Tony back to his workshop, where he got out of his suit.

"I want to read you the note. Because I believe her. But I'm in love, my judgment's no good. Tell me what you really think. Alright?"

Pepper sat down.

"I'm listening."

"It's in Russian. I'll translate it, as I read."

Tony began.

_"Dear Tony. I am not who you think I am. I am a liar, and a spy and a whore. My father had a grudge against your father. They were in business together, and according to my father, your father cheated him, and ruined him. He hated your father and he hated you, and when he died, all he left me was that hatred. I was hired by Justin Hammer, in exchange for a student visa, my educational expenses, and the promise of a future job to seduce you, make you fall in love with me, and abandon you. I am not a sentimental woman. My mother did not love my father, I don't think she even liked him too much. I liked Ivan, I cared for him very much, and I mourn his terrible death, far away in a terrible place. But I did not love him. I do not believe in God, and I did not believe in love. I told myself a million lies to convince myself I did not love you, but when I discovered you, so lifeless and cold it was like the ice and frost around my heart that has grown there since my father died melted away. If you were dead, I wanted to die, too. I could see that you are an innocent man, whether your father was or not, and I realized that I had done a terrible thing. I prayed to the God I have never believed in to save you. I promised Him that I would return to the Faith if you lived. But, if He exists, then I can't imagine He would want to see my face in His church, now. I killed the man who betrayed Ivan to the police. I cut off his ears and gave them to Ivan the last time I saw him. I took a contract to destroy you, a man I never met. The only way I can convince you that I really do love you, the only way I can save my soul is to end my miserable life. For my sins, for my father's, for love of you, I will gladly die. Goodbye."_

Tony folded up the letter, and put it in the back pocket of his jeans.

"I left some of it out. There were some very, ah, personal parts, things about me, and our sex life, things I'm sure you wouldn't want to know. Well? Do you think she's telling the truth?" Tony finished.

Pepper took a Kleenex out of her purse, and wiped her eyes.

"Yes. I do. I think she's one poor, sad, fucked-up little girl, too. No mother. Her father dies when she's 11. The man who takes her in barely waits for her to be pubescent before he takes advantage of her. Then he teaches her to be a cold-blooded killer. I doubted her, at first, but any fool could see, especially since your latest overdose, that the girl's crazy about you. Why the hell would she throw herself out the window? Why didn't she just tell you to your face what she told you in the letter? What were you going to do? Get on your high horse? That's a laugh. What are you going to do now, Tony?"

"I'm going to go to the hospital, and see Sasha. After that I'm coming back here, getting suited up and I am going directly through the wall of Justin Hammer's office."

"I mean, in the long run?"

"About Sasha? I'm going to save her. I've been saved, several times. Flynn saved me. Jean saved me. You've saved me. Sasha, she literally saved my life. Time for me to take a stab saving someone."

**III: Tony**

"Don't you have a TV in your house? A computer? Newspapers? String and a Dixie cup?" he asked the ER nurse.

"I know who you are. But that doesn't change anything."

Tony banged his head on her desk.

Twice.

"Miss Karamazov doesn't have any insurance! She doesn't even have a green card. And she has no family. At all. The closest thing she had to family was an ex-boyfriend who's a Russian gangster who died in a prison break in Siberia last month. Her local address? That's my address. Her permanent residence in New York? I own the building. Look, look at the paper the paramedics made me sign. It says I've agreed to pay the costs for her hospital stay. What do I have to do? Call for the hospital chaplain and marry her?"

The ER nurse was about to make with some witty reply to that when she was interrupted by a tall, stern-looking black doctor, right out of central casting, down to the greying temples, big wire-rimmed glasses, and James Earl Jones voice.

"It's alright, nurse."

"But Dr. Roundtree…"

The doctor ignored her.

"This way, Mr. Stark."

Tony walked with the doctor to a bank of elevators.

"How bad is it?" Tony asked him.

"Considering that if the main roof of your mansion hadn't broken her fall, she could very easily have been killed? Not very. Miss Romanov broke her right arm, a simple fracture near the shoulder, and cracked three ribs on the right side. She has several minor bruises and scrapes, and suffered a mild concussion. I want to keep her, for observation, until tomorrow morning. The only thing that disturbs me is that, in accident like this, it's usually someone falling out a large, main window. Not a bathroom window."

"My estate is almost all windows." Tony assured the doctor.

"There was no note?"

"None. I'm sure it was an accident. Sasha's a very sober, reasonable, intelligent young woman. She's got no reason to try to kill herself. Is she awake?"

"Oh yes. Awake and asking for you. She also claims she just fell out the window. She said she's not accustomed to air conditioning and she tried to open the window to get some fresh air."

Tony and the doctor both laughed.

"No fresh air in these parts! How did she even get that window open?"

"Forced it with all her might. Miss Romanov claims she was pushing on the window and it opened all of the sudden and that's how she fell out."

Dr. Roundtree opened the door to one of the private hospital rooms.

"It's plausible. But only just." He said.

Tony thanked the doctor for taking good care of Sasha, and went into the room and closed the door.

It looked more like a hotel suite than a hospital room.

Tony decided he was definitely getting his money's worth.

"Hello, Tony."

Tony grabbed a chair and pulled it up to the side of the bed.

"Good morning, Anna Karenina. How do you feel?"

"Like shit. They want to give me Vicodin, but Ivan used to sell on black market. No good. You take that shit, you get hooked. In Russia, once, I slip on icy step. Fall down, break leg. They give to me Ibuprofen. Big dose. Works okay. Did you get note?"

"I did."

"Then what am I doing in fancy room where hospital menu has steak and lobster?"

"I believe that you love me, Sasha. I would have believed you if you had just told me the truth. I'm not the naïve spoiled asshole people think I am. When I sailed around the world with Flynn after I graduated from undergraduate school, he didn't just show me the nice parts. And since I've become Iron Man, I've seen everything. Twice. I know what it's like in Russia, right now. I've been there, I've worked there, as a mask, and as a private businessman. I've seen it, up close and personal. Who wouldn't do anything, say anything to escape? And your father, Dr. Karamzov, he'd have to take a number and stand in a very, very, very long line of angry people my father screwed over who want to take it out on me. I've been dealing with that kind of shit since I was your age. And I'm not shocked or appalled that you killed a man, and cut off his ears. Flynn served with Eddie Blake in the Invaders, and played him, maybe you've seen the movie. They're old buddies from way back. Even before I became a mask, hearing the Comedian's war stories, from overseas and otherwise, I heard worse than that. In my life, I've seen worse than that. The only thing that shocks me is that you'd try to kill yourself to prove that you were worthy of me. Now that's' a joke. I'm pretty much a self-centered drunken slut with a big mouth and a good line of bullshit who has an appetite for self-destruction and the habit of using my great big brain to outsmart myself. I'm a wreck. My life is a wreck. I mean I used your birthday as an excuse to go on a binge. If I didn't have money, shit, I probably would have died in prison in Siberia, too. Well, Tijuana, would be more like it. And, honestly? I'm sort of glad you're at least half as bad as I am. It takes some of the pressure off me to be goody-goody good."

Sasha couldn't help but laugh.

"You are crazy man, Tony. But still I love you. Now, how do I get out of shit I am in?"

"Oh, I'll get you out of it. No problem. You just lie here and have as much steak and lobster as you want. I'll be back in the morning to pick you up with a green card and a summer internship. I've already taken over paying your accounts at Columbia. Which, by the way, were in arrears. They were about to boot you for lack of payment, but I made a few phone calls and a large donation and everything is okee-dokee, now."

"The little bastard, Hammer, he did not pay? I kill him!"

"No! No killing anybody just for the hell of it. I can see I'm going to have to finish the education the late Ivan started. I'm Iron Man, remember? I'll take care of Justin Hammer. And when I'm done with him, he'll wish I'd killed him."

**Tony Stark's Mansion, Malibu, 2010**

**II: Natasha**

The Black Widow looked at her reflection in the mirror above Tony's bed, on the ceiling.

_Natasha Romanova Karamzov, you are a fool._

Ten years.

Tony was wrong, it hadn't been ten years, yet.

It and been nine years, eight months, and two days since she had walked.

Again, Natasha went over her list of reasons.

His megalomania.

His drinking.

His "prescriptions"

His occasional drug binges, and half-hearted trips to rehab.

His ego.

His insanity and his inability to see that he was a madman, and that he lived a madman's life.

That she was a grown woman and had never even tried to make her way in the world, alone.

Natasha left Tony without taking a cent, and she had made her way in the world, very well.

As a mask, and as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Nobody made the connection between Natasha Romanova, the Black Widow, and Sasha Karamazov, Tony Stark's former girlfriend, and budding young sci-tech wunderkind at Stark Industries.

And Tony never gave her up.

When he was first introduced to Natasha Romanova, he was very charming and acted as if he'd never met her before, in his life.

No one knew.

Not even Director Fury.

Well, Agent Romanova had the suspicion that Director Blake, in S.H.I.E.L.D. Covert, he knew.

For some reason she couldn't figure out, he never said anything, either.

Nick had assigned her to the matter of Tony's latest disintegration because she was his top Agent and he was trying to place her on the Avengers team.

And she had taken it, because, she really did have herself convinced that her and Tony and what had been between them was a relic of a whole other life.

The son of a bitch, he had let her go for a week or three, until she felt confident in her convictions.

But, when he decided on it, it took him less than an hour to break her.

He hardly even had to try.

Sasha thought about running.

But she wasn't a stupid little girl of 18, or a dumb kid in her early twenties wanting to make her own way in the world; she was a grown woman, 32 years old and the way Tony had broken her, no, the way she had let him break her, the way she had broken, it convinced her that she couldn't put Tony on a shelf in the recesses of her mind and pretend he hadn't happened.

She had tried to do the same with Ivan, especially on the anniversary of his betrayal, of his sentencing, and his death, and then, when he returned from the dead, still hell-bent on vengeance; it was something that was almost intolerable to bear.

It was almost a blessing for him that someone assassinated him in his jail cell, in Monte Carlo.

This time, Sasha went to see the body, to make sure he was really gone.

She paid for him to have a proper grave and a proper tombstone, and prayed, for the first time in almost a decade, that if God was there and He was listening, that He would show Ivan mercy, and let him finally be at peace.

Tony, however, was not dead.

Yet.

And in his brilliant, disordered mind was locked away the key, not just to realizing his father's dream and perfecting his Iron Man suit, but to saving his own life.

It was up to her to complete her mission, to keep an eye on him and make sure he didn't auto-destruct, not just for the sake of Truth, Justice, the American way and the safety and security of the free world, but for Tony, himself.

And for herself.

Because Natasha Romanova, the Black Widow, was just as much in love with Tony as Dr. Sasha Karamazov had been.

Perhaps more.

Only death releases you from the thunderbolt.

And not the death of your beloved; your own death.

_When I am sure he is well, I'll leave; he doesn't know me as well as he thinks; I can walk away from him a thousand times. _

_Suffering is good for the soul._

"What are you thinking about?"

"How much I hate you. How much Ivan and Anton were right about you. That I wish I had never seen your face. And I know I cannot walk away from you, now. When you may be dying. When you need me most."

"I won't blow your cover, Sasha. I haven't, yet, have I? Besides, now I have reasons, other than just altruistic ones to make sure nobody knows your secrets."

"Yes. Now you have one up on Nick Fury."

"And so do you. But, don't forget, I always have one up on you, too."

"Are you blackmailing me, you son of bitch?"

"Honestly? Yes. I'm dying. Desperate measures for desperate times."

For a man who was dying, Tony moved with the grace and speed of a panther on the attack, hauling Sasha across the acre of bed.

He slung his legs over the side of the bed, planting his feet firmly on the floor, and hauled her into his lap.

"Oh no! Last time we do this, I end up falling off and smack head on dresser. No."

"I was drunk, it was three in the morning. If I'm only going to live another few weeks, a month or so, tops, life is too short for the missionary position."

"But I like it with you on top of me."

"Well, okay. But that only means before I let you out of bed, we'll have to do it, twice."

"Is okay. You may be blackmailing me, but I'm the one going to profit. I'm making quadruple overtime. I want 1965 black Lincoln Continental. Convertible. Canary yellow interior. Leather. Engine converted to hybrid."

"I actually know where I can find three of those. And I'll do the work, myself. You like my work, don't you Sasha?"

He drew her close, to kiss her.

"I love you, Sasha. Why can't you tell me you love me? You know you won't be able to walk away from me, again, don't you?" He whispered in her ear.

"I can walk any time I want to. And you can't make me say it. Or stay with you."

Tony laughed.

"Oh yes I can." he replied.


	3. Cruel To Be Kind

**Chapter Four: Cruel to Be Kind**

**New York, 2010.**

**I: Ivan**

The last thing that Justin Hammer wanted was for Ivan Vanko to go abroad in the world, but Ivan wasn't about to be the ineffectual little man's cat's paw.

He had things to do.

One of them was to find out just on what side of things his Sasha stood.

Ivan had not been angry with his father for telling Sasha that he was dead.

He and Anton had both wanted her to go to America, get a good education and make a life for herself, and she had done that.

What bothered him was that Stark had seduced her along the way.

Ivan didn't consider it Sasha's fault for falling for him.

When she met the son of a bitch she was poor, a teenager, and a stranger in a strange land.

Stark had absolutely dazzled her.

She was smart enough to get away from him when she was a little older and wiser, and stay away for ten years.

But Sasha had been at the Grand Prix, in Monte Carlo.

When the police were taking him away, he heard her, screaming his name.

She jumped over a barrier, and knocked three policemen on their asses, and for just a moment, her arms were around his neck.

"My God, Vanya! Vanya, you're alive!" she exclaimed, in their native Russian.

He would have held her tighter, but he didn't want to cut her with the broken machinery on his chest.

"Be careful, my Sasha. Don't let him seduce you again. Stark is the Devil." Ivan managed to say.

He had wanted to say more, but the police were on Sasha, and then Stark was pulling her away from Ivan and the police, telling them to leave Sasha alone, that Ivan was her ex-husband, whom she believed to be dead.

Justin Hammer had faked Ivan's death, yet again, but Ivan found out that Sasha had come to Monte Carlo to claim the body.

Not only that, she paid for Anton to be exhumed, too.

With her own money, Sasha bought an elaborate mausoleum at the cemetery of the Holy Virgin Protection Church in New York, the biggest Russian cemetery in the United States.

Ivan knew that she visited the monolithic Vanko tomb once a week, on Saturday, even though she was working for Stark again, in Los Angeles.

She came there to bring fresh flowers and talk to him.

What Sasha didn't know was that it wasn't just Ivan's spirit who was listening.

"It's cold today, Vanya. In LA, there is no weather. Not like here. Maybe in the summer, this place will be more pleasant."

She rearranged the new flowers and put her head in her hands.

"I don't know what to do, Vanya. I know you hated Tony very much. But you don't really know him. His father ruined his life as much as he ruined Anton's. Or yours. Or my father's. He's not a bad man. But he is mad. Completely and totally mad. And now he may be dying. How can I leave him to die, when I owe him so much? I lie to myself, Vanya. I have spent my whole life doing it. I try to say I never loved you. Or him. But I love you both. I should have told you. But now you're dead. I could have helped you, Ivan. I'm with S.H.I.E.L.D, you know. Level 10. You son of a bitch, if you would only give up your fucking vendetta, I could have made your whole past go away! And now, maybe Tony will die soon, too. I have to try and help him. I can't stand by and do nothing and let you both die. For ten years I worked hard to make my own life, and always I was alone. And I lied to myself to say that was what I wanted. What I wanted is for you not to go to jail. Or to die. What I wanted was for Tony not to be a drunken madman that no sane woman could ever put up with. What I wanted was for my mother not to go away. For my father not to die. But you get want you get, in life, Vanya. Not what you want. But you and Anton know that."

Sasha got up, and wiped the dirt and snow from her hands and her coat.

"I will come back to see you and Anton next week. I know that he found peace, in his life, he wrote and told me so. But not you. I hope that whether or not there is God, or afterlife, that you have found peace, Vanya. I would go to the church and pray for it, but the ikons would laugh, to see me there. If He exists, God, Himself, would laugh."

Sasha laughed a little to herself, mirthlessly and stoically, and, with her head held high, walked away.

Right past where Ivan hid.

He wanted to grab her by the arm, to crush her to his chest, and tell her that he was still alive and promise he would never leave her alone, again.

How his arms ached, and less poetically, how his balls ached, for Sasha.

His Sasha.

But it was not the right time.

Stark had poisoned her mind so deeply that ten years along, she could not free herself of his power, and now he had his hooks into her, again.

It was not enough for the son of a bitch to take his birthright, he had to take his Sasha, too.

Soon, however, Tony Stark would be dead.

Sasha would be angry with him, for a time, but he knew that would pass.

And then she would make good on making his whole life up to that point disappear.

Then, it would be Ivan Vanko who was sitting on top of the world with Sasha at his side, and Tony Stark who was six feet under.

Six feet under the rubble of his hubris and his dreams, his twisted suit for a coffin.

Ivan waited until Sasha was gone.

He took one of the roses Sasha had left from his grave and one from Anton's.

He carefully put them away from the cold, inside his coat.

Ivan laughed to himself, and lit a cigarette.

"Soon, Papa, Tony Stark will be the one who is dead. I will come here, with Sasha, to visit you, and bring you flowers. And no one will ever come to his grave."

Dr. Vanko looked at his watch.

Soon it would be time for that fool, Hammer, to come and inspect him.

It was time to go back to the lab, and continue his work.

There was little time, and so much left to do.

**Malibu, California, 2010**

**II: Tony**

Wearing only a green wife-beater undershirt, Tony Stark instructed Jarvis at the angle he was to position the webcam.

"Sir, shouldn't you shave? Shower? Comb and wash your hair? Clean up the bedroom? I don't see how any of this could possibly be…appealing." Jarvis suggested.

If it was possible for an artificial intelligence to disapprove, Jarvis was doing it.

Tony had been holed up in his bedroom for the past two or three days.

From the amount of empty bottles and take–out boxes lying around, and the fact that he and the bedroom were not in the best of shape, the average person would think that, in the wake of the Grand Prix incident, that he had been hiding from the world, getting drunk and popping pills, having a snit, while he allowed Pepper to take the brunt of the consequences.

Tony, had, in actuality, been hatching a plot.

Divert, and conquer.

He would spin Monte Carlo so it made him look like the stronger man, and then use the Congressional hearings to prove his point.

In the fifties, his father had made a monkey of a congressional headhunting hearing, rather effortlessly, and it was Tony's plan to do the same.

And, for a diversion, another Tony Stark sex tape, "illicitly" leaked to YouTube.

This one would have that whole Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, down and out and dirty, dirty, dirty sort of vibe.

"No, Jarvis. The idea is for everything to be desperately filthy and sleazy."

"Is there a reason for that, sir?"

"For Sasha."

"If you say so, Mr. Stark, sir. You have a call. It's from Miss Montalvo."

Tony had met Rita Montalvo, about eight years before, when he was dying of various well-earned afflictions in the charity ward of a hospital in Argentina.

Lovely Rita, his Lady Madonna, had saved his life, and nursed him back to health.

Even if she had not been wearing Marvel Comics scrubs, Tony would have known, immediately, that his angel of mercy was a superhero enthusiast.

Tony did not like to use terms like nerd, geek, groupie or fangirl for his fans.

Especially not the women.

Girls like her always had a thing for Tony, and although he was sometimes ashamed to admit it, Tony did a lot more fraternizing with his fans than most masks did.

God help him, as much as he liked gorgeous glamour girls, he had a thing for girls like this one, too.

Smart girls always had turned him on.

Rita was studying to be a computer engineer, at the time, and had long since got her B.S, her M.S. and a job at Stark Industries.

But she was also his and Iron Man's PR manager, his liason with Marvel Comics, and the only woman Tony had ever known that he never had to lie to.

"Put her through, Jarvis. Rita, you're late."

"Late for what, _cabron_? Do you have other plans?"

Tony laughed.

"Not really, no. How does it look, out there?"

"Pretty good. Much better than Pepper probably thinks it is. The Board may be having a shit fit, but the stockholders aren't. Your average stockholder, these days isn't too far above Joe Sixpack. He looks at the Monte Carlo thing and he thinks, it's cool how you fucking annihilated that Russian dude. It helps than Vanko is dead, too. And most people are on your side, not the government's. The stock went up. That should make the board happy. Let's face it, everybody likes it when you pull your dick out, and fuck somebody with it. Hard. Especially when you do it, literally. Which brings us to new business. Tony, do you want to make this movie because you need the good ink, or are jou just being a fucking pervert?"

"Are you making this movie because you want to further the cause of women who look like women, or nerdy girls, or are you just being a fucking pervert?" Tony replied.

"Neither. I'm a stockholder. Every time you and your understudy go on camera, the stock price goes up. I'm doing it for the money." Rita answered.

They both laughed.

"There's just one thing. You laid that big story on your lady love about how jou haven't fucked anybody for months, and all that other shit, and then this comes out? I want you to explain to me one more time about how putting out a video of you doing it to me is good for her?"

"Sasha is a strong-willed woman. She wants to eat her cake, and have it, too. What she's wanted, all these years, is to keep me on the string. Like she does to Hawkeye, the poor bastard. And I would let her, but I can't. Because I'm insanely in love with her. As deliriously happy as I would be when she was in my life, I'd be crushed when she left me. There's only so many lives even I have, and I don't know how many times I have to go on a 18 month binge and end up dying of malaria in a charity ward that I have before that's' it. Do you understand?"

"Not really."

"Sasha can't have me. And I can't have her. So I make the movies, in such a way that it…"

"…I know. It reminds her of when you two were together. And she downloads them and you find out her IP address when she does. But you've got her now, right?"

"Close. I'm very close."

'To what?"

"Close to the perfect balance of Sasha and I having a completely open relationship, but one in which she never splits on me for an extended period of time. This particular scenario is supposed to remind her of the first summer we spend together. `If I can get her on the hook with this, and keep her on it? Until my birthday? Trap is sprung, and finally, I've got her."

"What if it doesn't work?"

"Then I won't mind dying. And at least I was happy the last few days or weeks or months of my life."

"Tony, your other steady girl is Dr. Jean Grey. And Nick Fury's like, a hundred and he doesn't look a day over 45. The people jou know? They got shit that even you don't know about. They'll put you in the machine they used to coat Wolverine in adamantium if they have to. Nobody is going to let you die."

"Lovely Rita, that is not the way dying works. Even for me. But, I'm hoping that you're right and I'm being melodramatic. Or, I could be excusing a horrible act of emotional blackmail on the grounds of mortal necessity. Either way, it's magic time!"

Tony looked around, and emptied a trash can onto the bedroom floor, artfully arranging its contents.

"You really are a bastard, Tony. If I wasn't such a sad fucking fangirl, I'd quit speaking to you."

"And you have no tact. If I didn't secretly have a thing for girls who are smart, nerdy and dirty, I'd lose your phone number."

"But then I might lose my mind, and break into your house and make you give it to me whether jou liked it or not."

"Don't be silly, Rita. I'm a complete slut. A total whore. I always like it."

**Los Angeles, California. Stark Tower West**

**II: Pepper**

Happy Hogan shook his head, admiringly

"Whoa! Look at this guy. He's like the Energizer Bunny. And he didn't even take off his undershirt. Or his shoes."

"Happy, go past this part."

"But we've gone past the whole thing, except the part where Rita came in."

Pepper gave Happy a stern look.

"You watch these?"

"Well, yeah. I mean, Tony's my boss, right? And he needs to have somebody, uh, well, another guy, who's, uh, like, an average guy to, ah, critique his, ah, style. You know?" Happy stammered.

"I will never understand the whole guys and watching porn thing. But at least you're not some kind of amateur John Holmes. Oh My God! What was that?"

"They call that the money shot."

"I know what it's called, that's not what I meant ! Will you just go past this part! Past that part, too."

"Whoa! Now, wait a minute, honey. There's some real artistry involved in Tony's films. You have to admit it. That? Right there?"

Happy paused the clip.

"That is impressive. And it's not trick photography. I mean, the only thing holding her up is…"

"Happy!"

"Okay! I'm clicking, I'm clicking."

Pepper felt it was her duty to get a general idea of what was in Tony's YouTube sex videos, but she never sat there and watched them all the way through.

"Do you think Sasha saw this?"

"She probably watches all of his movies."

Pepper gave Happy another dirty look.

"What? Maybe she does. She used to live with the boss. Maybe she misses him."

"He's a bad man, Happy. A very bad man."

"I don't know. Maybe her and Tony, it's a thing."

"What kind of a thing? A watch me do it to another girl thing?"

"Well, yeah. Maybe she just kinda puts herself in the other's girl's place."

"You know what that is? It's sick. And wrong."

Pepper slammed down the lid of her laptop, and left her office in a huff.

She was so angry, she didn't look where she was going as she stalked towards Tony's office, and she crashed right into Natalie Rushman.

"I'm so sorry." Pepper blurted.

"Is okay. I wasn't looking, either."

"No. I mean about Tony. About his behavior. And the video. He's an asshole."

Miss Rushman laughed, and waved her hand, dismissively.

"Is okay, Pepper. I've worked for bigger assholes." she said, and went along her way.

* * *

><p>Pepper almost felt bad about slamming the door of Tony's office, and then she realized that in a few days, it was going to be her office.<p>

So, she slammed it extra hard.

He was on the phone.

"…no, I'm telling you the truth, it was staged squalor. Completely staged…no, I'm not following in the family tradition, did you see any milk bottles full of piss…I needed the Kleenexes…yes, that many, you try making a dirty movie, sometime, you need a lot of Kleenex…well watch the rest, you'll see I made a point of showing the camera I put a rubber on…look, Pepper's here and she's furious. I'll have to call you back…Kate said what? Oh, I agree, completely…what…yes, completely fake dirt…thank you, I will…I have to go, now…no, I'm fine…the undershirt was just part of the act…yes the gym shoes were a homage…HOMAGE! H-o-m, never mind, the next time I get a free minute, I'm going to make you a hearing aid that works…okay…who wants what…you're kidding, right? No?...Jesus, what an asshole…no, I wouldn't give him points, either, fuck him, it's not his movie…Well, I just talked to Logan and he agrees…no he doesn't have a phone up there. I should get smart and build myself a fuck pad in the mountains with no phone…"

"Tony!"

"I have to go, I'm in trouble…I'll talk to you later. Bye."

Tony hung up.

"So, you're mad about the You Tube thing?"

"Not in and of itself. I think it's kinky, but if you and Rita get off and make money with your so-called illicit sex videos, and this last one has distracted the public from what a train wreck your life is right now, fine. What I'm mad at is your timing."

"I thought my timing was perfect. Did you watch it?"

"Of course not. I did catch the introductory minute or three before anything was going on. I was disgusted. That was, literally, the dirtiest thing I ever saw. And I didn't even watch the sex part."

"You should. This was one of my better performances. So, what kind of terrible thing have I done, this time?"

"When did I meet you, Tony?" Pepper demanded.

"Is this some kind of trick question, Potts?"

"Don't get cute with me, alright? You're 44 years old, coming up on 45. You are way too old for the cute act!"

"Ouch! Wait. Let me think. Let me think around the holes the cocaine made in my mind…1982. I…was… in… graduate school? Yes, I was. And you were…you were getting your… your MBA! That's right. I was in Grad school at Columbia, and you were in grad school...somewhere in New York... and I made an indecent proposal to you in a bar in the Village . You dumped a rum and coke down the front of my pants. Ice included."

"Very good. Of course I might have guessed that you would be able to remember anything that was even remotely connected to what's down the front of your pants. And when did you hire me?"

"The day you graduated in 1985. The very same day of graduation. You still had your cap and gown on, I was literally right there. Am I getting any Brownie points for this?"

"No!"

Pepper sat down, across from her longtime employer and friend.

With a very serious expression on her face.

"Tony, I have known you for almost twenty-five years. I have worked with you for twenty-one years and, until you hired Natalie Rushman, I knew you were an asshole, and an insane megalomaniac, and a complete dick. But I never thought you were really a bad person. But you know what? Now, I do. I am glad I'm taking over this company. And I really hope that you do something very bad within the next few months so you get kicked out of the Avengers, I even hope that slimy Senator Stern and Rhodey convince the government to take your suits, because you are a bad person, Tony. That crazy Russian doctor? Vanko? He was right. You are Satan."

"I think he actually said I was the Devil. And I'm not sure how hiring Ms. Rushman convinces you that I should be in the plastic cell now that Magneto is AWOL."

Pepper slammed both of her hands down on Tony's desk.

Such that he had to take his feet off of it and jump to attention.

"I am not a complete idiot, Tony! I know that Sasha Karamazov became Natasha Romanova! And I know that Natalie Rushman is Natasha Romanova. And furthermore, I think you know, too! Don't you think that you did enough to, notice I said to, and not for, that girl, for one lifetime! The fact that you have battened onto her again is disgusting! She worked very hard to make a life for herself in spite of you. To the point of changing her identity, completely. I take it the only reason she's come back to you is because Colonel Fury, having no idea of her history with you, has assigned you to her. Probably to prevent you from doing anything else crazy to make the Avengers, or S.H.I.E.L.D look bad. And for you to take advantage of the situation is beyond heinous. It's completely and utterly despicable. I know this is a terrible thing to say to a man, but I hope your dick turns black and falls off. I really do. And I mean that, Tony."

Pepper spent a few moments savoring the expression of shock on Tony's face, and watching it slowly sink into his thick, egotistcal skull that perhaps, just perhaps, he had made a serious error in judgment.

"Did you ever consider how I feel?" he asked.

"No, I haven't. Because you've got that covered. The only thing you ever think about is how you feel. I just wanted to bring it to your attention that just because you can do something, and you want to, it doesn't mean you should!"

"You know, Potts, you may very well be absolutely right. And I have used the most underhanded possible methods to, and even I must say, wickedly seduce Sasha. Even to the point of blackmail. And not just emotional blackmail. I mean actual, literal, concrete and probably a felony blackmail. But the fact remain that I am hopelessly in love with her. As much as I was the day I met her. And very soon, for reasons I can't explain to you, it won't matter what I did. Because I will be totally out of her life. But right now? I desperately need to be with the only woman I have ever loved in my whole evil, selfish, drunken, manipulative, misspent life. And it is actually entirely possible that my dick will turn a strange color and fall off. Within the next few weeks."

That was an honest reply, and it was one that Pepper had not been expecting.

"Does this have something to do with why you've all the sudden made me CEO?"

"Yes. And it has to do with why Nick Fury is sending a watchdog after me, in the first place. It's about the sins of my father, Pepper. About his legacy. To the world. And to me. And it's about me turning 45. And it's about Monte Carlo, and the congressional hearings, and the government wanting to take Iron Man away from me. It's about Iron Man's future and the Avengers future. It's really, really, really complicated and very personal and I'm in a lot of serious emotional pain. You know, I could have been a real dick about you and Happy getting together, because, I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, I was always sort of saving you for later. And it really bothered me when the two of you fell in love. But it bothered me even more when you got engaged."

"Why? Because you're a jerk? Because you're a selfish, arrogant son of a bitch?" Pepper yelled.

"Yes. Exactly. Because Happy is a regular guy. He could stand to lost 20 pounds and he follows football and hockey and Star Trek, and he went to a state college whose games he still watches on Saturdays. He can hold onto the woman he loves. Because he's a decent human being, a good man. And I'm the Great and Powerful Anthony Edward Stark, Iron Man, and I drove the woman I love away. So far away that she literally had to become someone else. Because one thing I can't seem to get around is that I am a jerk and a selfish, arrogant self-absorbed son of a bitch who destroys everything he loves. Whether or not it's Flynn's DNA or Howard's chorusing through my cells, that means I really am Howard's son. He was the same way."

And that was a totally honest reply.

If there was anything that Pepper couldn't stand, it was when Tony's mask of bullshit, bravado and wit slipped enough that you got to see the man behind the curtain and that he was, quite frequently, a confused, lonely, desperately unhappy person.

It made her see him in the one way she would rather not look at her boss, as an ordinary human being.

Because when she thought about Tony as an ordinary human being she was reminded that he was a man who would never be quite sure who his father was.

That fireman had pulled him crying and screaming, out of the wreckage of the accident his mother lay dead in, which crippled Howard Stark and took what was left of his sanity.

That Howard had shut him up for four bizarre years in the funhouse from Hell and that it was only chance that Tony had been spending a week with Flynn that spared him from dying in another twisted wreck that took the sad vestiges of Howard Stark's life.

It made her think of Jean Grey, who gave up Logan, who she loved, because that was what was right and it was what her husband wanted, but who was firm about the fact she couldn't leave Tony because she was, besides Pepper, herself, all he had.

And Steve Rogers who worried about the state of his best friend, the son of a good friend, more than he worried about the state of the nation, the planet, or even the universe.

Worse, it made Pepper think that inside the Iron Man suit was her very best friend, a very brilliant , very astute, very capable, but yet deeply flawed ordinary human being, whose life was as fragile and finite and capable of being snuffed out by a moment of violence as anyone else's.

She bit her lip, and moved a strand of her hair behind her ear.

"Oh Tony, I'm sorry! Sometimes I forget there's a man inside the suit, and that he has feelings just like everyone else. But you forget that about everybody. Especially women. Something your stepfather is guilty of, too, he of the four marriages. Love does not mean never having to say you're sorry. That was a really, really, intensely stupid movie. But, it also doesn't mean that blackmail is okay. Sasha isn't having too easy of a time, either. She just buried a ghost from her past that she thought had been dead for 15 years. And now, all of the sudden, here you are, back in her life, as needy and greedy as ever. Possibly worse. Think of Sasha as a human being, Tony. As a woman who fell in love with you when she was a very young girl, and spent a decade trying to make her way out from under your shadow. Give her credit for that. She owes you absolutely nothing, Tony. She made Natasha Romanova all on her own. If she took this assignment, if she's back in your life, or your bed, it's because she still loves you, and she wants to help you. Not because of any of your blackmail. Or bullshit. Be courteous. Be kind. And above all, be thankful, you egotistical son of a bitch."

Tony sat back in his chair, and looked into his glass.

"Pepper, after all this is over, do you think I should consider another stint at the MORC, and another try at the S.H.I.E.L.D Moderation Program. Or at least, something like it?"

"Just let me book you in for a thirty day stay beginning on the first of the month after next. If you want to cancel, fine."

"It's a deal. Now, I'm going to finish cleaning out your office, and then I am going to take Miss Rushman out to lunch, and beg her to forgive me, and pour my heart out to her, like a complete idiot."

"Finish tomorrow, Tony."

"Good idea."

**III: Sasha**

When she saw the number on her caller ID, Sasha didn't want to answer the phone.

But it kept ringing.

"Hello?"

"Tell me the only reason you're not on your way back to New York is that nursemaiding Tony is your job."

"Clint, you don't understand him."

"Yes I do. I've been working with him for the same ten years you've been running from him. I understand the crazy son of a bitch just fine. In the suit? He's a great man. Out of it? He's an asshole. Sometimes, he's a likeable asshole. And sometimes? He's just an arrogant dick, who will do whatever he has to, so he can get what he wants. You don't understand Tony. You see him the way you did when you were 17. And he was thirty."

"Don't start."

"I'm starting! Look, I know this is the pot calling the kettle black, but next to Tony, I look like a humble, patient, quiet man! All I've been hearing about from you for the entire time we've been together is how this guy is the All Enduring, Tragic, Great Love of Your Life. I always thought you were just using him as an excuse for the fact that you can't commit. That's alright. I don't mind. Commitments aren't good for people in our line of work. You know I love you. You know that what we have, is good enough for me. All I'm saying, is, Jesus, Nat, this is a fucking insult. You're going out on a limb for this guy. I mean you didn't just leave him, you became a different person to get away from Tony. And the way he thanks you for giving him another chance is to make the cheapest, dirtiest YouTube sleazefest of his entire sleazy amateur porn star career with the most devoted of all his Iron Maidens? And you're not mad?"

"No."

"No? No! Why the Hell not?"

"You don't understand. He's flirting with me."

Clint put the phone down and did two minutes of uninterrupted cursing.

"Flirting with you?"

"I keep telling you that you don't understand."

"You're goddamn right about that, Nat! Look, you tell that jerk that I said he had better have a fucking good explanation by the next Avengers meeting, because Steve doesn't understand either. Next time he shows his face, it's getting smashed in. I love you. Goodbye."

From the sound that terminated the call, Sasha was fairly sure that Hawkeye had smashed his phone.

In contrast, a few minutes later, Tony actually knocked on her door.

"Come in. It's open."

"Do you want to have a really long lunch and take the rest of the day off? This place is depressing the hell out of me, today. I just had this really heavy conversation with Pepper and I almost told her I was dying and now I feel bad I didn't and if I don't die, you know, I think I really need to go to rehab. Again."

Sasha rolled her eyes.

"What? You don't need to go to rehab, now. You got no smack at your house, no coke. Just a little pot. You're only taking three prescriptions. And you're not drunk during working hours. For you? That's sober like judge. And Pepper is always reading you riot act. Now she gets all over your shit because you make fuck movie with Rita. So what? You both like sex, you both like money. Me, I like your fuck movies. I watch them all. I watch this one six times, already. For ten years, I wish you were not so in love with me, and that I am not so crazy for you because it means that we do not get to fuck, and I have to make do with watching you fuck other women. Pepper is so uptight. Now she gets you all upset so that now, when I have chance to get legs around you right after you make hot movie, even though you go to all this trouble, you come into my office a wreck, and I don't get laid."

"Well, maybe not right now. And I knew you watched all the clips. That's how I've kept track of you. Through your downloads. Did you like the new one."

"It reminded me of my first summer in New York."

"It was supposed to. I had just got out of rehab, and you were so beautiful, and I was so in love with you. I didn't want to go anywhere. I didn't want to see anyone. I didn't want to be anyone. I just wanted to make love to you. Sasha, ever since I traced your IP address, and I realized you've been following my amateur work, I've been making these clips, just for you. They're like love letters. Except, you're not a very sentimental woman."

"I figured that. And I know what you are trying to do. Tony, I am not angry with you that you try every trick in book, even dirtiest ones, to get me back."

"You're not? But Pepper said…"

"Don't listen to what she tells you about me. Or you. She don't understand man like you. Most men can be so cold. Calculating. Rational. They want to own a woman, to possess, like dog or hat or pair of pants. Talking about relationships, you can see where they are making little spot for you in the scheme of their lives. It is almost inhuman. Not you. You don't want fucking relationship. Nothing rational, or calculated, or planned. You want affair. Crazy and stupid and wild and just because it's what you want. That's what I like about you. You know that love is insanity. Lightning in bottle. Like when we meet. That feeling, like violent electric shock. It never really went away. But every time I watch movie you make, I feel it, again."

The maddening thing about Tony was, he was incredibly sweet and tender at the same time as he was callous and insensitive, but he really did love her, and the only thing that meant to him was that he never wanted her to leave his life.

And although Sasha felt obligated to visit Ivan and Anton every week, doing so always took a lot out of her.

It had been so cold in New York, and the way the withered roses looked against the snow and all the grey, icy concrete tombstones.

It made them both seem more dead, as if they had never existed at all.

On the other hand, Tony was not dead.

Sasha had been up half the night, crying, and then she talked to Clint, in New York for a few hours, and following that she watched Tony's latest video four or five times.

She didn't want to be sad, or nervous or worried and watching the 20-minute YouTube clip moved all of those thoughts from her mind.

Sasha was hoping Tony would make a move on her, but there was still something paramount in his devious mind.

He'd already had her, so that wasn't going to be good enough.

"Then, tell me you love me, Sasha."

"Tony.."

"Tell me you love me, and I'll buy you the Moon. If it's not for sale, I'll steal it. Whatever you want, if it's in my power to give it to you, it's yours. If it isn't, I'll find a way to get it. Even if it is the fucking Moon. I don't care."

He got on his knees, he really did.

"I'll marry you. I'll dance at your wedding if you marry Clint. I'll pay for it. Anything."

"I want to be in the Avengers. What do I have to tell you for that?"

"Goddamnit, Sasha, don't be so Russian and fucking impervious with me! I know you have a heart, because I've been doing the funky chicken all over it, and congratulating myself on what a good job I'm doing. No, that's not what I want. I want to spend the last few months or weeks of my life with the woman I love. I know I couldn't hold onto you because I'm an asshole and a crazy asshole at that, and I'm not going to change. But I need you now, Sasha. I'm like anyone else, I don't want to die and the thought of it scares me. I certainly don't want to die alone. My father, he had this knack for first alienating, and then destroying everyone he ever loved. And I'm just like him. Please, Sasha. If I don't die, you can pick a language in which to tell me I'm a cunt, and throw me out of your life. Just wait. You don't have to come to my funeral. Or visit my grave. Ever. Just don't leave me until I'm in it. Alright?"

Tony put his hands on her desk and slowly got to his feet, wincing.

"Fuck, am I this old, already?"

"Why do you have trouble getting up from knees?"

"I must be getting arthritis."

"Is more like poison is spreading. Do all joints hurt?"

"Actually? Yes? Even the ones in my skull."

"That is no good. But I fix. Come here."

Sasha took a circular hypo out of her desk, and jammed it against Tony's neck.

"Owww!" he helped.

She watched some of the purple streaks coming out of his collar recede.

"What the hell was that? I feel about a thousand percent better! Do you have any more?"

"Yes. But you must take in small and infrequent doses."

"Do you think if I had another shot, oh say, ah, right exactly now, I'd get really high?"

"You would get really dead."

"That is what Flynn told me when I explained speedballs to him."

"And they only killed you three times."

"Twice. No, let me think…no, you're right. Three times. I take it this joy juice won't work, permanently?"

"It won't. But listen, you are not going to die, Tony. It's my job to make sure you don't. We have Ace up sleeve."

"I don't like 'we'. 'We' sounds like a whole lot of people I never liked who think I'm an asshole are going to be involved. Why can't you just admit it? You took this job because you love me, and you want to save my life."

"You know something, Tony? Almost every word that comes out of your mouth has 'I' or 'me' right before or after it. What about me? I didn't just leave you because of things you did. Or didn't. A lot of why I left had to do with me. I wanted to make my own life, you know. Isn't it enough that you know I don't want to leave you again? It's not all my fault! I wanted to come back to you, eight years ago, and you told me to fuck off!" Sasha replied.

"I told you that when you left me it almost killed me, and that you couldn't casually pop in and out of my life when you felt like it! That's what I told you! Because I knew that's what you had planned!"

"I was just a kid, what the fuck did I know?"

"Do you know, now, Sasha? Now that I'm fucking dying!"

"I don't want to leave you again, okay? But I worked hard to make my life, and I don't want to give it up. Especially not Clint."

"When did I ever ask you to give anything up? I'm just fine with separate lives. Separate houses. Separate jobs, separate finances. But, I think you should get a place here. In LA. It's the least you can do. Considering you live with Clint Barton in New York."

"We live in same building. Different apartments."

"Oh, so now we're going to split hairs! I might have known! I come in here and pour my heart out to you, and you want to make it a business negotiation!"

"Clint's not like you—"

"Bullshit! Clint is almost exactly like me. I know. I work with the man. We're both the same kind of asshole. He's pretty much your me substitute, if you want to know the truth."

"He's not a fucking maniac! Besides, I don't feel about him like I do about you. We're more like really good friends."

"And what are you and I? Sasha? Enemies?"

"Do you think I have been so fucking happy without you? You say I broke your heart. All I wanted was the time to make my own life! I came back, to try and invite you into it. But you didn't want that! You wanted me to be your little Sasha, like a kept mouse!"

"I wanted you to understand that the next time you left me, it would kill me. Now? I don't care if it does. And I'm not just saying that because I may be dying, Sasha. The next time you walk out of my life, it will kill me. I will pine away and die without you. Like Beauty's Beast. But, now that I've come so close to death, I realize that living without you is not life. It's just waiting around and having another drink until it's time to die. I'm a selfish bastard, and there's no one in the multiverse I love more than I love The Great and Powerful Tony Stark. But even so, you've got my life in your hands. If you want to take it , go ahead. I said I'd give you anything it was in my power to give and I fucking well meant it."

For only the fourth time in her life, Sasha thought she might cry.

"Why do I have to tell you I love you, Tony, when you know that I do?"

That was close enough.

Tony sank into the chair opposite her desk.

"And now I can die a happy man."

"You are not going to die."

"I wish I could be so sure. Not now that we've, what do they say, worked out the kinks in our relationship…wait. Christ, I hope we never do that. It sounds boring."

Natasha scowled.

"Don't use that word! I hate that word! Relationship. It makes it sound like something bad. I don't want to have relationship. I want to have affair. That's why I pick guy like Clint. And you, Tony. If I want relationship, I pick nice guy like your driver."

"Me too. I agree. I hate that word. But women like it."

"Not this one. You have had rough day, already. Go home early. Let me take you to my bungalow at the Chateau Marmont. Is very nice. You should see it. Especially considering you're paying for it. So, you take nap, I call for Chinese food, we eat in bed, then is time for your close up, Mr. I Haven't Had It For Three Months Before You Showed Up. Liar!"

"It wasn't much of a lie. Just a little one, to make you feel sorry for me. How did you know?"

"You didn't look too much out of practice. Anyway, I knew when you told me that you didn't fuck for three months, because you were so sick. You? If you were that sick, you would have been dead for three months. Besides, for a guy who may be dying, you put on good show. I never see Black Sabbath as being band you can fuck to, but it turns out good for you. I especially liked the part where you pound on chest and yell "I AM IRON MAN" at paying shot."

"Money shot, Sasha."

"Yes. You and Rita probably make a lot of money on shooting these things. And I almost believe you when you go on TV and complain about the violation of your personal life and hers. What do you tell her you have kept shirt on for three months for, though?"

"I haven't. Rita knows. She doesn't know it's life-threatening, though."

"Good. Don't tell her. Because it's not."

"You just can't live without me, can you?"

"I tried. Is no fun."

**IV: Pepper**

Tony stuck his head in the door of Pepper's office.

"Ah, Miss Rushman has been having some difficulty getting into our network from her hotel, so I'm going to have to go over there and see what kind of gremlins have taken over her laptop. I may have to lend her one of our prototypes, so I have to, ah, assess that. Personally. See what the wireless capabilities are. Check the router. Look for three-prong outlets."

Pepper raised an eyebrow.

"Really? So you, the CEO, are going to go to a new employee's house for a low-level tech appointment that could be taken care of by someone from BestBuy?"

"Pepper, Miss Rushman is going to be your assistant. And you are going to be the new CEO. Would I leave your fate, and the fate of my father's company to the Geek Squad? They don't even drive real Beetles. Perish the thought! I'll be in again, tomorrow."

Pepper left her desk and watched Tony and Natasha walk to the elevator.

She wasn't stomping, she wasn't shouting at him, in fact, it looked like she was having a hard time maintaining a professional distance from her employer.

As the elevator doors shut, Pepper saw Miss Rushman grab Tony by his tie.

"I hope he used his retinal pattern scan to shut that camera down." Pepper muttered.

She went online and shut down the cameras in that elevator, anyway, just in case.

"I don't know how he does it. All I know is, it never works on me." She mused.

Well, not very much, anyway.


	4. Reeling in the Years

**Chapter Four: Reeling In The Years **

**S.H.I.E.L.D & Masked Operative Rehabilitation Complex (MORC), San Ysidro, CA, 1987**

**I: The Man in the High Castle.**

It had been seven years since The Man in the High Castle was removed, forcibly, by S.H.I.E.L.D agents from the bewitched squalor and institutionalized madness of his penthouse suite at the top of the Las Vegas casino he owned, after the last shreds of his fragile sanity disappeared.

He was a very old man by then, nothing more, really, than a bag of raw nerves and old bones, looking at 75 as if he was 25 years older.

But, he was a very important man, a man whom the government who worked behind the government could not afford to lose. That is why Nick Fury sent a team in to retrieve the gaunt old skeleton, and bring him to S.H.I.E.L.D's state-of-the-art facility.

For seven long years every doctor and specialist and psychiatrist and nutritionist that money could buy had been had at work on the project of restoring the old bag of bones to his place as the Man in the High Castle.

They cut his hair and his fingernails, and he was infused with Infinity Formula and wonder drugs.

Occupational therapists and physical therapists were called in by the metric ton to convince the Man to do something besides get out of bed in the morning, park himself in front of the television in his bathrobe and sit in front of it all day, pausing only to ring for nurses and attendants to bring him his meals.

Psychiatrists and psychologists came to him in all manners of theories and approaches, and he paid no attention to them.

It was the same thing, for years, and then, one afternoon in 1985, the Man turned off his television set and went into his bedroom, in which there had hung, waiting for him for years, ten identical pairs of khaki pants, ten identical white button-down shirts, ten sportcoats in various shades of khaki, brown and beige, his fedora, ten pairs of white, unworn Keds, two ties, one blue and one red, and one sportcoat in beige with brown lapels and accents.

He had specified, in a lucid moment three months after he was brought to the M.O.R.C that he wanted the aforementioned, and that only his hat and the one sportcoat should be brought from Las Vegas, everything else was to be new, and come from JC Penneys.

After looking into the closet, he rang for his nurse.

"Nurse, how am I supposed to get dressed if I don't have any underwear? Now, I'm going to need ten pairs of boxer shorts, and ten undershirts. From JCPenney's. No socks. I hate socks, they make my feet sweat, that's why I wear gym shoes. After I can get dressed, send that doctor in here that was talking to me about behavioral therapy. I might go for that. The rest of it sounds like a whole lot of bullshit, pardon my French."

When the package arrived, The Man was on the phone.

"I think it was senility, Ron…yeah, I know I'm not much older than you are, but you didn't scramble your brains the way I scrambled mine…some kind of vitamin, I'm not sure…no, I think I ought to stay here for a little while and sort out some of my trouble, I just wanted to call and let you know I've got my mind back, so you can send somebody along to get me up to date on what's been happening. How about Eddie…what happened to him…I'm sorry, Dutch, I'm still a little deaf, I thought you said a giant squid…Jesus Christ! Well of course he's not really dead, weren't you briefed on anything…well, leave it to Dick to just smile and leave you with a Jesus Christly mess on your hands. I'll look into it for you. Don't you worry, Dutch, we'll get this country straightened out. Tell you what, you come up with some pretext to come out to the coast, and come here, to the hospital, and we'll talk…it's good to hear from you, too, I'll see you soon…Bye, now."

Nick Fury came with the package, himself.

"Jesus Christ, Nick, how the hell did Dutch Reagan get to be President? Where the hell do you have Eddie stashed, and what's all this bullshit about a god damn giant squid?"

"Well, Howard…"

"Never mind that shit! I guess I'll talk to one of those behavioral shrinks, because I'm not taking any of this god damn medicine, other than that Formula, because it looks like without me, this country's going down the tubes!"

"It is. That's why I invested all this time and money in your restoration. Now, about Eddie. Just what was it you shot him up with in that basement in Brooklyn in 1944…"

* * *

><p>After a year of intensive therapy, Howard's doctors thought he was about ready to return to Las Vegas, and to his regular irregular life, but Howard was dragging his feet.<p>

What he needed was a reason.

Howard liked everything to be just so, and when it wasn't, he noticed.

In the morning, the girl who brought his breakfast looked like she was going to cry.

He took a walk on the grounds and ran into Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne visiting the Todd kid, and neither one of them would look him in the eye.

Not to mention, right after Howard left his psychologist's office, he saw Flynn sitting out on one of the balconies and he looked like he hadn't shaved, showered, or slept for two days.

He didn't ask anybody, because he figured they'd give him the run around, but after lunch, he followed his former nurse to the hospital wing.

After she and two doctors left room 386, Howard went in.

A long, awkward moment of silence passed between the tall, lanky man leaning on the walking stick and the man lying in the bed.

"Well, that's settled, at least. You still look like your mother, but you look like me, too. I guess I owe you an explanation."

"Nothing's settled. You and Flynn are about the same height and build and your hair's the same color. An explanation for what, Howard? I never believed you were dead. I figured you went crazy and they had you locked away, somewhere."

Howard pulled a chair up to his son's bedside.

"Yeah, well, that I did."

"Everybody heard the rumors. Howard Stark's a crazy old man, living in seclusion. He never cuts his hair or trims his nails or puts on pants, and he watches TV all day long, the same shows, over and over again, and he pisses in Mason jars and saves them."

"Milk bottles."

"Whatever. But, in his lucid moments, he's still running the world."

"Well, I stopped having lucid moments in 1980. Goddamn, I've been here for seven years. I didn't make any real progress except for the last two. But, you look like Hell, Tony! All these wires and tubes and machines! You're only, Jesus, 22 years old! What, do you need a kidney, or something? We'll get the damn blood test. Hell, I don't care if it say's Flynn's your father, I'm still your old man. You can have my goddamn kidney. Hell, if he gives you one of his, the son of a bitch would probably grow back."

"I don't need a kidney. I OD'd, or something."

"You did what? Drugs? You're on drugs! Oh my God! Where the hell is that SOB, Flynn? I'll knock his block off!"

"Howard, please. I never got high with my stepfather, and he never gave me any drugs. It's no big deal, really."

Howard looked at the chart.

"Jesus Holy Christ! You had a heart attack! You're 22 and you had a heart attack!"

"Yeah. Speedball."

"A what?"

"Coke."

"Cocaine! Jesus Christ, Tony, how could you be so goddamn dumb! You didn't turn out to be a drunk, like your poor mother, did you?"

"Not everybody can be like you and drink milk."

"I had no idea, Tony. I really didn't. People must have been lying to me, all these years. Or at least only giving me a selective version of the truth. I know you graduated from MIT when you were 17, and took over Stark International at 18, and graduated from Columbia with an M.S, this year. Turned the whole damn company around so that in 4 years you've almost become a billionaire in your own right. Hell, I even read about you and Marvel Girl in the tabloids. You and a whole bunch of starlets and Eurotrash debutantes and heiresss, in the tabloids. Where did you find the time to become a cokehead and a boozehound?"

"I don't sleep much."

"Yeah. I'll bet. Well, son, this is what we're gonna do. As soon as you can get out of this bed, we're going back to Las Vegas. And you're going to get your lazy, skinny, flabby ass into shape. If you're gonna do this booze and dope roundelay, you're going to have to get a lot stronger! How do you think, besides being a goddamn mutie, that Flynn could keep it up…there you are, Flynn! I was just talking about you. Listen, we need to get this kid into shape! Look at him!"

"I agree with you, Howard. You've had far too soft of a life, Tony. I mean, one measly little bump of coke over the line, and your heart nearly gives out? You're going to have to see how the other half lives."

"When we get back to Vegas, I'll hire the best goddamn trainer than money can buy. Guys who train fighters. Nutritionists. Dieticians."

"Get him to a gym. Every day. Tennis lessons…"

"…marathons. Karate. All that shit. Then, when he's fit as a fiddle, you can take him to sea for a year or two. Show him the world. The hard way."

"That's what I was thinking."

"Do I have any say in this?" Tony piped in.

"Hell no! You've had your say, and look what you did to yourself! Me and Flynn, we're gonna make a man of you, the kind of man who can give Steve Rogers and Eddie Blake and Superman a run for his money."

"But what about the company?"

"I'll worry about our company, Tony. You worry about you. Shit, I need to get back to Vegas. Yesterday. I need to get things ready. Flynn, can you hold down the fort here?"

"Certainly."

Howard got to his feet.

"Don't worry, Tony. I've got everything under control."

"Whenever you talk like that, Howard, it worried me."

"When the hell are you going to stop calling me by my first name? I'm your father, goddamn it!"

"When that's' been proven."

"Aw, Hell!"

Howard left the room, looking distracted.

Tony sat up in bed.

"Does he know his buddy Eddie Blake is dead?"

"Eddie's not dead."

"Yes, he is. He got thrown out of a window, and his head went up into his stomach."

Flynn shrugged.

"Howard got him straightened out."

"How? Wait. I know. If you tell me, someone has to kill me with a shrimp fork. You're not really serious about this whole, Tony Stark, man of iron, thing, are you, Flynn?"

"Completely."

Tony looked thoughtful.

"What the hell? I've tried everything else." He decided.

**Greenwich Village, New York City, 2000**

**I: Tony**

"…that's fine with me, Sasha. I can understand you wanting to make your own way in the world. Just don't go to work for any of my competitors. And try not to move to the East Village. No matter what they call it, or how much the rents are, it's still the Bowery."

Natasha reached around Tony, and turned off his laptop.

"You're not listening to me, Tony. I am not child, anymore. Ever since I come to the States, I rely on you for everything. Job, car, apartment, bills, school, everything. I'm 23 years old and I have an MS but I have never had a bill in my name, I've never looked for an apartment, I've never really lived on my own. I get offer from S.H.I.E.L.D., to be an agent. I try just working in private sector, but I miss the kind of work I used to do in Russia, when I lived with Vanya. It was criminal, then, but I made a lot of money and I liked the work. What I'm saying, Tony, is, to have my own life, I need to make my own life. Away from you. I still love you. Nothing but my death will change that. I know it may sound cruel. But I have to do this."

Tony's heart dropped into his feet.

He felt a burning in his chest, and then he felt dizzy, and faint.

A brilliant blue light flashed before his eyes and he thought he was dying, until he realized that was just the arc reactor in his chest, flashing.

Just?

And then it was dark, very dark, and all of the sudden he felt terribly cold.

"Sasha, what are you saying? Jesus, what the fuck are you telling me? I don't care if you become a spook for S.H.I.E.L.D. I don't care if you quit your job and move out of your apartment and give me back the car? What interest would I have in stopping you from having your own life? I don't care if your idea of a career choice is to assassinate the President of some small Central American country with an olive fork! Do what you want. When you want. With who you want. Hell, you can get the Superhero Yellow Pages from my desk drawer and fuck everybody in it! Twice! But, for God's sake, Sasha, you can't leave me! I love you! My mother left me, my father left me, you can't go! I'll die without you. I will! I'll die!"

Tony wasn't sure at what point in time he had gotten on his knees on the ground, in front of her, but Sasha had this horrified look on her face.

"Don't beg, Tony. Please."

"What, you want me to be reasonable about losing the only woman I've ever loved? I'm not going to make this easy for you! I can't!"

Tony jumped to his feet, and ran out of the room.

He came back, bare-chested, with a screwdriver in his hand, and handed it to her.

"Before you go, just pry the arc reactor out of my chest, and smash it. I haven't got a spare, but I want you to. Because you are literally murdering me. Don't shut me out of your life, Sasha. Even if you only come to see me once a week, hell, a little is enough! But you can't just walk out on me! Jesus, you say you love me! Do I mean that little to you? Can't you understand what you're doing to me?"

Tony realized, however, that she didn't.

Not at 23.

"Tony, you're scaring me."

"I know I am. I'm sorry. I can't help it. If you have to go, do it. Just go. Don't say anything else. Don't call me, and don't write to me and don't send me chatty e-mails like we can be good friends. We can't. It would tear out my heart. You don't understand, do you?"

"No."

"You will. Someday. Just go, Sasha. And don't come back, unless you mean it. But, if you get into any trouble, in any way, anywhere in the world? I don't care who you work for or what you've done or how bad or hopeless it seems. Call me. Before you hang up the phone, I'll be there. No questions asked."

Now she was crying.

That's alright, he was crying, too.

"Tony, this isn't what I wanted."

"Then don't do this."

"I have to."

"Then go."

**II: Jean**

Dr. Jean Grey was in her office, correcting papers.

She had a large backlog of papers to correct, so when her husband burst in without knocking, she was annoyed.

"What is it, Scott? Is the building burning down? Are there Sentinals on the lawn? Because I goddamn well told you…"

"Jean, your friend Tony Stark is here. And there's really something wrong with him. For one thing, he's drunk and hysterical, and when I say hysterical, I mean he's in tears. But he's very pale, and he's sweating bullets and he's completely incoherent. All I can make out is 'She left me'. I think you'd better do something."

"How bad is it, Jean?"

"He had another heart attack. If it wasn't for the arc reactor, he'd be dead."

"A heart attack? But he's sober, well, sober for Tony."

"I'm telling you, Steve, that girl leaving him literally broke Tony's heart. And his mind. He's had a complete mental and physical breakdown."

"Oh my God. What are we going to do?"

"I don't know. I'm not that kind of doctor. It's a good thing that Charles is. Tony's going to stay here, for awhile, and Charles is going to treat him, and I am going to take care of him, and reassure him that I, for one, will never leave him. Ever."

**Las Vegas, 2000**

**III: Fathers and Son**

"It's nice of you to let me stay here, Howard. Dad, I mean."

So you're satisfied you're my son because you lost your mind? Don't let Flynn kid you. He's stark raving loony. I know how you feel, Tony. It took me twenty years to get over your mother's death. At least the girl isn't dead. Now, you might think the old man is crazy, but even though I may not look it, I am an old man. I'll be 90, next year. And one thing I know for damn sure is that there's nobody, no matter how smart they are, who knows shit about anything when they're 23. You didn't. I didn't. But when you're in your 20's, Christ, you think you know everything. Now that girl of yours, your Sasha, a few years are going to go by, maybe even five or seven or ten, and she's going to begin to understand what it was she had with you, and what it is she lost. Love doesn't just evaporate into thin air. Look at me, and Katie. You know when she left me? 1938. Do you think I thought about that for a minute, earlier this year, when I heard that she was sick and probably on her way to a long, slow, painful death? I didn't."

"No, Dad, you didn't. You flew onto the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, unauthorized, stormed Nick Fury's office and put a gun to your head."

"You're goddamn right I did! I pulled the hammer back and I told Nick Fury that if Kate Hepburn was dead, I didn't want to live, either, and therefore, if the Colonel didn't release a little more Infinity Formula for "Katie", I was going to blow my brains out all over his desk. He believed me, too. But when people think you're crazy, you can get put the damndest things over on them."

"Howard, you are crazy."

"You're goddamn right I am. That's what Katie said. She said, 'Howard, you're out of your mind. You're 89, and I'm 93. We've lived our lives, without each other, and we've no right to anything more. But we're both a couple of selfish bastards, so I suggest we go right ahead and take it'. So far, things are working out pretty well. What I'm saying, Tony, is don't throw your life away. You and Sasha will get your second chance. Where there's life, there's hope."

"I don't feel very hopeful, Howard."

"That's because you're young and melodramatic. Hell, you aren't even forty, yet. And this is only the first time you've ever lost your mind. Don't worry, son. You'll get the hang of it. By the time you're 50, why, you'll be able to lose your mind and get over it in less than a month. Now, I'm going to drive over to McDonalds and then go to the Super Target, and buy some more Germ X, and pick up some things. And you are going to put some clothes on and come with me."

"I can't."

"Sure you can! There's nothing to really be scared of out there. Just do what I do. Wash your hands and say to yourself, well, I'm a nut, and it can't be helped. I think I'll go have an ice cream, and try not to think about it. We're leaving in ten minutes. Make that fifteen. If I don't clean that spot off of that window, I'll be up all night thinking about it."

**Los Angeles, California, 2000**

"Tony, I know why you don't want me to go with you."

"It's not what you think, Flynn. I'm not sailing off to meet my doom."

"I know a man who's going gently into that good night when I see him. I tried all that, you know. Before you were born. You know what I got for my troubles? A premature end to my movie career, and my life as I knew it, a drug habit, and ten years in and out of the MORC and the worst assignments possible from Nick Fury as my punishment for being a very bad boy. I missed half the lives of my children, and I almost lost your stepbrother, permanently. It wasn't until Sean very nearly died that I really looked at the shambles of my life and I said, see here Flynn, or Blood, or whatever your name is, what the hell are you doing? The only reason I didn't die is the good old X-Factor. But, the jury is still out on which of us, me or Howard, is actually your Dad. If it is Howard, you haven't got the X-factor to fall back on. And you've already had two heart attacks, and you're only 36."

"I appreciate what you're telling me, Flynn. And what Howard has been telling me, too. I've tried to listen. I just can't. I have do this. If I don't, I'll just put a gun in my mouth and blow my head off. At least, this way, I have a chance to survive."

"If you get into any real trouble…"

"You'll be the first to know, Flynn."

**Letter from Tony Stark to Jim "Logan" Howlett, dated May 7, 2000. **

_Dear Logan,_

_ I kept wanting to tell you this, earlier, when I was at the X-Institute, but I couldn't tell you to your face._

_ It would have given both of us too much pain._

_ My friend, you are crusin' for a brusin'._

_ And so is your brother._

_ There is a special kind of hell a 17 year old girl can make for a man who's in love with her._

_ All of the sudden, it's daylight, and springtime, even though it's been winter and ten minutes past midnight for your whole life, as far back as you can remember._

_ You're a new man, and you want to be a better man than you ever were before, and you're just so in love and everything is so wonderful, but do you know what you've forgotten, Big Daddy?_

_ The girl is seventeen._

_ That little red thing on the turkey hasn't popped out, yet._

_ It's not too soon after 17 that 21 comes, and after 21, comes those itchy feets you had when you were 21._

_ And she won't mean to hurt you, when she tells you about how she has to go and live her own life._

_ She'll be crying, and she'll feel terrible about it, and she really will miss Big Daddy when she goes, but make no mistake, she's going to go, and she'll have a wonderful life and always love you and think of you fondly._

_ And you and Victor Creed will be tearing each other's faces off trying to get your heads in the oven, first, to suck on the gas pipe._

_ Marie is a lovely girl, and I'm sure she's a good girl._

_ So was Sasha._

_ You don't know how this feels, Logan, and you, of all people, who has suffered so much, you don't want to._

_ Remember the girl who didn't leave when she turned 21?_

_ The one who didn't leave me, either?_

_ Okay, maybe Jean is married, and we both only get one day out of a week with her, and every once in awahile, she ups and dies for a bit, but has she ever left us?_

_ No._

_ Will she ever leave us?_

_ No._

_ I may be wrong about Marie, and I hope I am._

_ But just in case I'm not, listen to me, Logan._

_ Eat crow. Crawl on your hands and knees. Cry and scream and grovel and slither across her office floor on your belly, like a snake and kiss her shoes, if you have to, but get your Wednesdays with Jean back and never ever put Marie ahead of her._

_ Jean's a good woman. She won't let you down. And she won't say she told you so._

_ I wish I loved Jean the way you did, I wish I'd had some other women in my life that I have loved, but I don't, and I never have, so I'm doomed._

_ Remember my words, Logan, because the next time you see me, I'll be a jumbled mass of bleached bones, identifiable only by the rotting piece of metal screwed into the sternum._

_ There's a reason why they have laws against fooling around with young girls, but they should raise the age of consent to 25, because what us old farts are doing is eating the poison candy._

_ It's lethal._

_ If you're not 100% hooked on Marie, say goodbye._

_ Don't walk away, Logan, run, even if you have to chew off your own fucking leg._

_ And if you can't, hold onto Jean like she's a lifeboat and you're on the Titanic._

_ Otherwise, mutant, schmutant, someday they'll find your adamantium bones rusty and jumbled, washed up on some distant shore, just like mine._

_ Tell Jean I said I'm sorry._

_ It's not that she wasn't enough._

_ It's not her, it's me._

_ If you ever seen Sasha again, tell her I love her._

_ After a decent time has passed, tell Pepper I'm dead, and let her know that my will is in the Frye boot box in the closet of my workshop at my house in Malibu._

_ See you in Hell,_

_ Tony_

**Las Vegas, 2002**

**I: The Man In The High Castle**

The Man In The High Castle looked out the car door window, and watched Vegas flowing by him.

His telephone began to ring, and he reached into his inside jacket pocket for it.

"What?"

"Say, 'Hello', not 'What'. Are you going to be alright?"

"Who me? Hell, Katie. I'll be flying. I'll be fine."

"I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about what happens when you're on the ground. Call me when you get to Mexico. In one piece, or otherwise."

"What?"

"Turn up the volume!"

"What?"

"The volume! It's on the right hand side of the phone!"

"I can't hear you, Katie. This goddamn thing is too quiet. Call those boys in Engineering. Remind them it took me two days to design a new phone and it's been a month and I have no prototype yet. By the time I come back, I'd better have a goddamn prototype, or people are going to lose their gravy goddamn jobs! I'll call you when I get to Mexico. I'm hanging up now. I'll call you back from a land line."

He put his phone back in his pocket with a grimace of disgust.

"Strange world." The Man said.

He put his long arm around the big, red Target shopping bag with the white target on it, with a trace of anxiety, and shifted his tall, rangy body around, uncomfortably.

The Man in the High Castle had left his keep, and he was leaving his fiefdom, and not for the familiar territory of Los Angeles, either.

He was taking a rare journey into the unknown, and had the need to talk to someone.

Even if it was just the guy from the car service.

"What was that, Mr. Castle, sir?" asked the driver from the car service.

"I said it's a strange world. It used to be you had to sell people something for their money. Even if it was something stupid. It still had to be something. Not now. Take this whole wired society, this whole personal computer phenomenon. People regularly pay more to get the same thing they already have. Or less. I mean, in 1985, you sold some dumb kid a Commodore 64. So he could play Oregon Trail. Then, in 1991, you sold him an IBM, with Windows whatever on it, so he could write his high school papers. And talk to his dopey friends on the Internet. Over the next ten years he updated his desktop, a couple of times. In 2000 or so, you sold him a laptop. Which did the same thing, only now he could do it, wherever, and he was in college or graduate school. Then you sold him a smaller laptop this year, and in 2004, they're going to start selling min-computers. And what's he looking for, now, on the Internet? Someplace he can download Oregon Trail."

The driver laughed.

"Man, I never thought of it like that."

"Well, you're not old enough to. That's a blessing, and a curse."

The Man in the High Castle was a more than a secret.

He was a whisper in a dark hallway, a fleeting thought, a shadowy notion that was better left unexamined.

He was whispered about by many, and known only to a few, but, from far behind the scenes his hand was still tight on the reins of power.

However, even Achilles had his heel.

There was a time when he couldn't have done what he was doing, today.

Ten years of that time, in fact.

Maybe more.

But, 20 years ago, he had made his first forays back into the world, after a decade of hospitals, surgeries, psychiatrists, therapy, medications, and Infinity Formula, and he had done it for the same reason he was leaving the comfort of his Las Vegas fiefdom, today.

To save his son.

Grasping his walking stick, he thought about the window of his penthouse apartment.

It was a huge window, disguised on the outside façade of the building as a series of garish mirrors, but it was a window, nonetheless.

The window from which the Man In The High Castle looked down on his world.

Because much of it was his; he had a hand in creating it, from sea to shining sea, and he still had a hand in shaping it.

Secretly.

From behind the scenes, from this penthouse fortress high above Sin City.

He was more mobile than he used to be, but still, he didn't like to leave.

"You have any kids, Driver?"

"Two boys. One's ten. The other's eight."

"Enjoy them when they're that age. Because after that? Nothing but trouble. Take my son. My only son. He's 37 years old. Well, he's had quite a life. He's made a great deal of money, and he's a big man in his field. He graduated college when he was 15. MIT. Graduate school at Columbia University when he was 20, and that's with taking time off, in-between. But the boy's a mess. He's been an alcoholic all his life, since he was just a little older than your boys are, and he's had a drug problem since his early teens. Been to rehab more than 10 times since 1987. And that's just for dope. He's still a drunk. And then, wouldn't you know, when he turned 30, he falls in love with a girl of 17. I mean, the boy must have had a thousand women if he had one and he waits until he's a grown man to fall in love with a child. Three guesses what happened when she grew up to be a woman?"

"She dumped him, flat?"

"You got it in one. That was two years ago. He went off on a trip about 18 months ago, and nobody's heard of him, since. Now, I'm an important man of business, here, you know. And in LA?"

"I know, Mr. Castle, sir. RKO is the studio that Marvel Studios is with, right?"

"That's right. I'm the guy who produced all the superhero movies I've been hard at work, looking at scripts for the next X-Men movie. Not to mention what I do here, in Vegas. I'm up to my eyeballs in work. I haven't got the time for this trip."

"Hey, is it true that Robert Blood, you know, the CNN guy, the big reporter? He's going to make a movie for RKO?"

"If I ever see his brilliant script."

"Because I read, you know, on the Internet, on this one website that his father? Robert Blood, Senior, you know, how he was a big reporter and all, too, all that Vietnam stuff, and you know, Chicago in 1968 and all. Is it true that his father was Errol Flynn? You know, from the old movies? Because he sure looks like him. So does his son, on CNN."

"I can't say I know for sure, son. I was a close friend of Robert Blood, senior, and his mother told him that his real father was Flynn, alright. Blood and his son both sure do look like Flynn. But, anything's possible. Especially in Hollywood. But, like I was saying, you can see how I'm a busy man, right? The last thing I have is time to go off on some wild goose chase to find my boy. But, if I don't, who will? He comes by his brains and his craziness, honestly. He got them from me. His mother's dead. She has been since he was 8. Nearly killed all of us, driving drunk. So, it's up to me. Hell, I'm his father."

"Do you know where he is?"

"I got a tip he's in South America. Brazil, or Argentina, maybe. I have to meet a contact in Mexico, get more information. I hope the boy hasn't moved on. But f he has, I've got money, and the best goddamn airplane money can buy. Come on out, son, I'll show it to you."

The driver opened the door, and the Man in the High Castle unbent his lanky, six foot, four inch frame from the confines of the Lincoln Town Car.

Even with his walking stick and his limp, he started walking quite rapidly towards the Sonic Arrow.

The Man in the High Castle has spent the better part of the last ten years designing, building and testing it.

The Arrow was the same size as a Lear Jet, but far more streamilined in its design.

The nose was pointed, like an arrow, and it wasn't that ugly white color like a city bus, it was all chrome, except for the tail and the wings, which were metallic blue.

"Wow! This thing looks like a spaceship from those fifties movies!"

"Well, I like an aircraft to look like an aircraft. Not like a goddamn Greyhound bus with wings. She's supersonic, ultralight, and completely powered by arc reactor technology. Best goddamn idea I've had in this century. I flew her from here to Japan and back, but this will be her first long-term flight. I hope to Christ I don't crash her. Because she's the prototype."

The Man fished in the pocket of his tan sport jacket, then in the pocket of his white, button-down shirt, and finally in the pockets of his khaki pants, before he found his wallet.

"I don't know, son, is twenty a good tip?"

"Fine, Mr. Castle sir."

Mr. Castle took off his battered fedora, ran his hand through his back-combed, thick black hair that was grey at the temples, rubbed his thin moustache, muttered something to himself, put his hat back on, took a notebook and pen out of his Target bag, and wrote something down.

The driver brought his black carry-on size rolling suitcase, purchased at Target, and the man in the High castle made his way to the Sonic Arrow, lost in thought.

"Well, I'll call for you when I come back."

The Man stopped, and scuffed one of his dirty white Keds against the other.

"Hopefully, there'll be two of us."

That night, the driver from the car service went on a website that existed to report such things that he, personally had driven Howard Stark, the Howard Stark, to the Las Vegas Airport, to go look for his son, Tony Stark, in a supersonic spaceship.

Most people didn't believe him.

Even though it was true.

**Mexico, 2002**

**II: Flynn**

If there was one thing Howard wasn't, it was a field man.

Howard was happy in his penthouse, in his casino, in the movie theatre attached to his casino, on the golf course, behind a desk or a camera, at his old RKO Office in LA, and in the air.

Those were the only places Howard was happy, although he'd go other places, if he felt it was absolutely necessary.

The other thing about Howard, he was a creature of habit.

He'd done the same things, in the same places, the same way for about twenty years.

The only deviation he'd taken from his path was when he found out Kate Hepburn was dying.

Most men would go for a visit, to say goodbye.

Not Howard.

"Katie? Dying! Oh no, Flynn. I'm going to talk to Nick Fury about this, right now."

"About what?"

"This is my chance, Flynn! It's been seventy years, women can have a career and a boyfriend and whatever else they like. And I'm better, too. So there's no reason we can't patch things up."

"Not even that it's been seventy years? What are you going to do with that gun?"

"I'm going to make a big goddamn scene, that's what!"

Most women Kate's age wouldn't have been willing to take the chance, on life, the 21st century, or Infinity Formula.

And certainly not on Howard Stark.

But most women weren't Kate Hepburn.

Flynn honestly didn't know how she, or anybody else could actually live with Howard.

And Howard was one of his oldest and best friends.

For one thing, he didn't take medicine for his OCD.

He hadn't since the eighties, and he saw a psychiatrist every week who had him on some kind of special behavioral therapy, which enabled Howard to be about as normal as he had been until the late forties.

Functional, but…

…still Howard.

In Flynn's opinion, Kate, the advent of small cans of Lysol, hand sanitizing gel, and antibacterial wipes had done Howard more good than any doctor ever would.

Still, the last place for a man who used a Kleenex from a pocket pack to open a door, then washed his hands with a liberal drop of his ever present bottle of orange scented Germ-X were the kinds of places that they were going to have to go, in order to find Tony.

Flynn met Howard at the private S.H.I.E.L.D. airfield in Mexico City.

He was standing outside the specially equipped black Land Rover that he had managed to wheedle out of Nick Fury just for the occasion, as Howard alighted from his latest invention.

Looking rumpled, with a reusable shopping bag from Target in one hand, his walking stick under his arm and hauling a rolling duffel bag, probably also from Target, behind him.

Howard was rather fond of Targets, and absolutely hated Wal-Mart.

The only store he personally frequented was a Super Target in Las Vegas that had been built within 10 miles of the Stark Hotel and Casino because Howard got tired of driving almost 200 miles every time he wanted to buy food, and with the exception of his visits to Dairy Queen, Wendy's, and McDonalds he insisted on buying all his own food, and if not preparing his own meals, then having them cooked them at home.

"Tell me that's not all your luggage, Howard."

"Sure it is. I've got a month's worth of clothes and whatnot in the pull bag, and I've got some odds and ends in the shopping bag. I might have brought too many cases of water, though. That's some kind of vehicle you've got there, Flynn. I like it. I could drive all the hell around Vegas, and make a splash in LA, in a job like that. How much do you want for it?"

"It belongs to S.H.I.E.L.D."

"Bullshit. If it makes it through this trip, I'll buy it. And one for you, too. I'm going to go get the water. Did Nick send you, Flynn, or was this your idea?"

"My idea. He's my son, too, you know. And you're no field man."

"He'll be someplace filthy, Flynn. Living like a bum. Just to irk me, the goddamn little bastard! I just hope he hasn't got himself killed."

"I doubt it. He learned how to survive from me, didn't he?"

Howard raised an eyebrow.

"I'm going to go get the water. Are you making any progress on that script?"

"I'm still trying to get around all the cuts you told me to make. You shouldn't be such a prude, Howard. It's not the forties, anymore."

"Me? A prude? Hell, Flynn, the script you gave me was definitely going to be an NC-17! Do you know how hard it is to make any money, to get any distribution for a movie once it gets an NC-17?"

"Why would it get an NC-17?"

"The big fuck scene, that's why!"

"So? There'd plenty of movies that get an R that have fucking in them. Besides, it's a costume picture. You can always get away with more in a costume picture."

"Well, we'd never goddamn get away with a big fat closeup of you, buck naked!"

"I can think, off the top of my head, of at least ten movies with male frontal nudity that got an R rating."

"Oh yeah? Well, let me tell you something that you should already know, Flynn. None of those R-rated dicks were yours. Your dick is X-rated. Triple X. Never mind NC-goddamn-17!"

"I think I'll take that as a complement."

"You would."

They both started to laugh, got in the Land Rover and Flynn drove off.

**Argentina, 2002**

**I: Tony**

_Wrecked and ruined and broken down._

_ The Urban Spaceman has met the ground._

_ Where he lies he'll never be found._

_ Dying of malaria in a small Argentine town_

"Neil Young." Tony suddenly said.

It was the first thing that he had said in three days, surprising the nurse on duty.

"Que?" she asked.

Tony's mother was an Argentine, of Spanish and Irish descent.

He spoke fluent Spanish, and answered her in kind.

"I was thinking something. Something that sounded like something Neil Young would write."

Tony fell asleep, soon after, and didn't wake up again until someone was speaking to him in English.

The nurse on duty, she had gone and got his nurse

"Tony. Wake up Tony. Wake up, _hombre_. Come on."

Shocked at hearing his name, Tony opened his eyes.

It was her, of course.

His Angel of Mercy, his Lady Madonna.

Even if she had not been wearing Marvel Comics scrubs, when she had first come to the ward a week before, Tony would have known, immediately, that the woman bending over him was a superhero enthusiast.

Tony had a nickname for his most devoted and intelligent female fans, he called them the Iron Maidens, and he had a special relationship with them.

Most mask fans could expect their hero to be polite, respectful, and remote.

Not Tony.

The Iron Maidens were like his own private army, bound to him by their devotion, because he paid special attention to all of them.

There were precisely one hundred and ten of them, all over the world.

He answered all their mail, personally, and he regularly exchanged e-mails with each and every of them.

He'd been intimate with 75 of them, and had every intent of getting to the rest.

He owed it to them, after all.

Especially the one , who, coyly anonymous, always wrote to him in purple, 11-point , High Tower Text.

They maintained a very personal correspondence.

After all, the Shadow has his faithful network of souls he'd saved, why was it any less noble for Tony Stark to have his Iron Maidens, his army of lovers?

Tony liked to think that, in the same crazy way they all loved him, he loved them all, too.

And what could be finer and more noble than that?

He recognized the young woman bending over him, immediately, the first time he saw her.

She was definitely one of his Iron Maidens, but his mind was too confused to put a name to her face.

She had that kind of pretty, Western movie senorita kind of face, but it was marked by intelligence and concern, and a cute little pair of granny glasses perched in the middle of her nose.

Taking in the measure of her, Tony guessed that she would have been something like 44, 28, 44, a zaftig Iron Maiden with an hourglass figure.

Too cute to be too many minutes over 21.

A science major….but he'd thought she was studying to be a chemical engineer, not a nurse.

Well, he was dying, he was entitled to be addled.

Girls like her always had a thing for Tony, and although he was sometimes ashamed to admit it, Tony did a lot more fraternizing with his fans than most masks did.

God help him, as much as he liked gorgeous glamour girls, he had a thing for girls like his Iron Maidens, too.

Smart girls always had turned him on.

It took her a little while, a few days to recognize him.

But that was alright.

He wasn't Tony Stark, anymore, after all.

"I don't know any Tony."

"Speak English! And don't tell me that ridiculous lie about you having an experimental arc reactor and Tony Stark paying for jou and some operation. I know who you are." She continued ,in English.

"_Que_?" Tony asked.

"You think I'm just going to let you die, don't you?"

"_Estoy muriendo_." Tony persisted.

"No, you're not going to die. I don't care if it's what you want. Or even what you deserve. I won't let you."

Tony gave up his charade.

And he remembered her name.

Rita Montalvo, who lived in a seaside village in the temperate pampas of Argentina.

Tony had told her about how his mother was from a town not fifty miles from hers.

"There's nothing you can do about that, now, Rita. Can you get me a bottle, in here? And stay with me, while I drink it. Stay with me, please, until the end. I admit it. I'm afraid to die alone."

"I keep telling you, Tony. You're not going to die."

A burly orderly arrived with a stretcher and he and Rita lifted Tony's ravaged, emaciated body into it.

Being moved terrified him, but she reached for his hand even as he raised it to look for hers, and walked along beside the gurney.

"Don't be scared, Tony. I promise won't leave you."

Tony was feeling delirious.

"Sasha left me. Mama left me. Don't leave me, Rita. I'm so scared." He muttered.

"I won't ever leave you, Tony. Not ever."

They wheeled him to another part of the Catholic hospital, out of the charity ward.

His devoted Iron Maiden gently undressed him, and covered him with a blanket that was warmer and softer than the ones in the charity ward.

He held onto her hand with all that was left of his strength.

And then, Tony had an epiphany.

A moment of shocking clarity, not unlike the one he'd had while he was a prisoner in Iraq.

This was real.

Death was really approaching.

Suddenly, as mortal terror began to set in, dying didn't seem like such a good idea, anymore.

Everything he had done since Sasha left him didn't seem like a good idea anymore.

Tony wasn't sure what, aside from instinctual mortal terror was making him want to live, all the sudden, but even if that was all he had, he decided to go with it.

"Rita! Rita, I want to live! Get me a doctor. Get me a whole bunch of doctors. Tell them who I am. Whatever I need, I'll pay for it. Triple. Call my father. Both of them. Wait. Get me a priest. I haven't been to church since the 70's!"

"It's alright, Tony. I figured you'd feel that way. So I took care of things."

A doctor came in, and looked at a printout he had in his hands, and examined the scar on Tony's leg from the car accident that killed his mother, and then looked at the serial number printed on the outside of the arc reactor, with a small, hand-held blacklight.

Tony had the Avengers insignia tattooed on his right bicep, with special ink that, when you exposed it to a blacklight, his name and Social Security Number would become visible on the long part of the "A".

It was Cap's idea, and everyone on the team had it done, for purposes of emergency identification.

"You're right, Senorita Montalvo. This is Tony Stark. Do you know who you are. Mister Stark?"

The doctor spoke to Tony as if he was crazy.

Like his father.

Well, he hadn't cut his hair in over a year, or shaved in four months, so he was getting there.

"Of course I do. Don't let me die, doctor. Or any of those other people out there. I'll pay for their treatment too. I've been such a fool…" Tony replied.

In Spanish.

A flurry of activity followed, and Tony was wheeled in and out of several rooms.

He was in an out of consciousness during several tests.

The girl in the Marvel Scrubs, Lady Madonna, children at your feet, wonder how you manage to make ends meet.

She had a telephone, which she put to his ear.

And the frightened voice on the other line.

"Tony? Is that you…"

Potts.

"Tony, you goddamned bastard! How can you be dying? On a charity ward? Please, Tony. You can't do this to me!"

She sounded like she might cry.

Another reason to live.

For all the people who would regret his passing.

"It's me, Potts. Send them triple what the bill is for. The people on the ward need the money. But listen. Don't tell anybody where I am. And don't try to find me. I've made a terrible mistake. Flynn and Howard were right. But I need time to make things right. Okay?"

"Alright, Tony. But you had better call your fathers. And Steve. And Jean."

"I will, Potts. You'll hear from me again, soon. I promise."

Lady Madonna took the telephone away.

No, Rita.

Lovely Rita, where would I be without you?

When the gurney finally stopped. Tony realized he was in a hospital room, a private room.

It had been a long time since Tony had laid down on a soft bed, covered in a warm blanket, and the experience was luxurious.

The face of a priest and a doctor in a white coat appeared over Tony's head.

Tony remembered asking for a priest.

"He's awake. Good."

The doctor left the room, and the priest sat by Tony's bed.

"I guess you want to know why a man like me calls for a priest."

The priest laughed.

"You are not such a bad man as that, are you?' he asked.

"Father, I haven't been to church in twenty years. But I was baptized. My mother was a Catholic. And an Argentine. If I'm dying…"

"If you are dying, you want to see your Mama again. How old were jou when she died, my son?"

"Eight. It was a car wreck. She was driving. It left my father with a limp. My father. I want my father. Both of them. I can't die like this. I'm scared.. I'm a terrible man, father. _Mal pinga. Pendejo. El Cabron._"

"Maybe jou are. But those are not big sins. To be an asshole. Or a bastard. Or a stupid dick. You have done many good things, despite all of that."

"Should I confess?"

"Dios mio, I don't have the time! It would take hours! I don't think jou are going to die. And I don't think jou are having a sincere conversion. But, then again, I don't think that Our Lord would deny a man who has, in spite of himself, tried to do so much good in the world, to be with his mother in heaven. Tell me, my son, have you committed any mortal sins?"

"Yes, Father. Two years ago, the only woman I've ever loved left me. And I've been, willfully and purposely trying to kill myself, ever since."

"That's not the same as suicide, my son. That's what's better known as dying from a broken heart. But, nonetheless, I absolve you…"

The priest anointed him with holy oils, and said the rest of the sacrament in Spanish.

The doctor came back in.

The priest began talking to him in Spanish, and Tony asked him where Rita was.

"He is more coherent. The medicine is working. He is asking for Rita."

Rita.

Lovely Rita.

Lady Madonna.

"I want her to be my nurse. Full time. I'll pay for it." Tony piped in.

"Rita would be in this room full-time whether you paid her or not." The priest told him.

The doctor told Tony that the tests showed he was suffering not just from malaria, but malnutrition, viral hepatitis, and anemia.

Now that he was getting proper treatment, he was expected to make a full recovery.

"What about my heart?" Tony asked the doctor.

"It is weak. You have put quite a strain on it. But you are in no present danger of another attack."

"Was I dying, earlier? I felt like I was."

"You were going into shock, Senor Stark. But I can't say that you were actually dying."

"But I wasn't far from it?"

"No. You weren't."

Tony was quiet, for a few moments.

"Do they still make those white nurse's dresses?" Tony asked the doctor.

"Some of our staff wear them."

The doctor replied, trying to keep a straight face.

"Get one for Lovely Rita. One that's about a half-size too small. I'd pay just about anything, to see that. Sorry, Father."

"I'm the one who took the vow, not you. We'll just say it's good you're feeling better."

"I have to live for something. To live for Rita's sake? It's a start."

* * *

><p>Tony wasn't sure how long he was asleep, before Rita came back.<p>

She had the dress on, and it hugged every curve of her body, and she couldn't button the top two or three buttons.

She even had the little hat on.

"You look absolutely perfect, Rita. You make me want to be get better. As soon as possible. The dress, it's not uncomfortable, is it?"

"No. It's 2 percent spandex, so it moves. You're going to get better, as soon as possible. Tonight, you are going to have the best dinner your money can buy. And the administrator sent me to buy you some clothes."

"No pajamas. I hate pajamas."

"I know. I bought you some tee shirts. And sweatpants. That's as far as the hospital will go."

"Not the ones with the elastic waist and ankles, I hope."

"No. The kind with the drawstring waist. No elastic, anywhere. But first, you have to have a bath."

"And because I am weak as a kitten, that means you have to give me a bath, right?"

"Yes."

She had to help him into a wheelchair, and then into the tub.

However, Tony wasn't sure if it was the medicine they had given him, or the good sleep, or the change in accommodations, and the knowledge that one of his Iron Maidens was at his side, but in the warm bath in his private bathroom, he started to feel much better.

Especially with Rita bending over him in the tub, her absolutely stupendous tits bursting out of the nurse's uniform, only a few inches from his face.

Tony couldn't walk, and it would have been an effort to soap up the washrag, but hope, among other things, springs eternal.

"I see you're feeling better."

"Lovely Rita, I apologize. But nothing, short of death, will discourage him. Take it as a complement. You'd better let me have the wash rag for a minute. I don't want to embarrass myself, any further."

Rita helped him to dry off, and to put on an AC/DC tee shirt and a pair of black sweatpants, with white trim.

The clothes hung on him.

"I bought them in your usual size. Because I'm going to make sure you get back to it."

Suddenly, Tony was embarrassed to be so helpless.

"I'm sorry to be such a burden to you. I'll make it up to you, Lovely Rita. Someday."

* * *

><p>Time went by, quicker than he was accustomed to.<p>

It seemed to Tony that it took him no time at all before he could walk back and forth to the bathroom, and bathe and dress himself.

Record time for him to gain back the twenty or thirty or forty pounds he had lost, and start re-conditioning himself with the hospital's physical therapist, and with the gym equipment in the physical therapy room.

But, Tony was sitting in a chair, facing his window when snow began to fall past it.

The leaves had just been turning when he dragged himself into the charity ward.

"Rita, how long have I been here?"

"One month on the charity ward. Two months in this room."

"That long? Jesus Christ." Tony replied.

And not totally without a certain awe.

He was thinking about what the hell was going to happen next when his doctor came in.

"I'm going to set you free, Tony. Try not to do such a good job of killing yourself, again."

"Am I well?"

"You're well enough. You need time to recover, completely, but there's no reason we should keep you locked up in here."

"Does that mean than if I do something about Rita, in that dress, sticking her stupendous tits in my face, I won't die?"

"Is that what's kept you going, _hombre_?"

"Don't knock it. I don't know if I want to be Tony Stark, or Iron Man, anymore. I don't know where I want to go after you let me out. Or what I want to do. And when I was in the ward, I didn't know if I wanted to live or die. But, the first time I saw Rita, I thought, God, it's one of them. One of my girls, my Iron Maidens. I knew her face right away. I know all of my Iron Maidens. But I couldn't remember her name, right away. Even while I was lying there, most likely scant hours from death, I wished to God I was well enough to be the man she expected me to be. The man I promised her, promised all of them I always would be. The man I was, before I reduced myself to the sorry state I was in, being the selfish prick that I am. If I'm well enough to be that man again, even if its only for Rita? After months of her in that dress, painted on? That's better than good. It's a reason to live, again."

"You're a strange man, Mr. Stark."

"I may be an asshole, and a real bastard, but I'm a Romantic. I love women. Especially the ones who save me. I want to start by living up to all the filthy, nasty, dirty fantasies Lovely Rita has ever had about me. Then, maybe she'll make me want to move up to being me again. Who knows?"

"Wait until you're out of the hospital, Mr. Stark."

"Doesn't Rita work here?"

"No. She was volunteering, until you hired her. Rita is from a little town near _Mar del Plata_. It's on the coast. "

"I know. My mother came from some little village by the sea, not far from here. Right now, I can't remember the name."

* * *

><p>"...I know it looks like an ordinary Vanagon camper. Well, actually it's a '75 and it's the deluxe model. It has everything. Sink, stove, tables. Fridge, cabinets, one of these pullout cots. Electrical hookups. Water storage. There's an awning, and a tent and the deluxe popup. Toilet, rear table. Map table. Storage unit. AC. Automatic transmission. But I did some modifications. I put the whole stereo system in, and that computer is built into the panel, there, and the whole thing, inside and out, runs on arc reactor technology. No gas. No electric. I mean, I live here. What do you think?"

Tony had never seen Rita in civilian clothes.

Jeans, an X-Men shirt, Converse sneakers.

She wrinkled her nose in the cutest little way, and adjusted her glasses in a scholarly fashion.

"It's cool. But jou can't live in this thing, forever. What about the money?"

"I have some left."

"Tony, jou are coming home with me. I don't have a car, you can park this in my space in my apartment building. But I can see if I just let jou go, you'll be dead in six months. Unless you don't want to."

"I was hoping you'd ask me to come with you. I don't have any big plans."

"Jou have plans?" Rita asked.

"Yes. I do. I want to live in my camper, and listen to the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, and smoke dope, and drink beer. I miss the ocean, I want to get back out on the water. I'm bored, I probably need a job. I think I'll work in a garage. But do you know what I want to do the most?"

"What?"

"I want to prove to you that I'm exactly the kind of man you thought I was. Do you live with somebody, or anything?"

"Me? No. I had a bad breakup, when I graduated. I'm single. Very single. I haven't seen a cock that wasn't on YouTube in six months."

"Except for mine."

"Yours was off limits."

"Not anymore, my Lady Madonna. Why don't you shut the door? And lock it."

"Why? Do you have Internet?"

"Certainly. Everywhere. I had perfect high speed internet in the Amazon. But that's not what I had in mind."

"Me? You want me? I could understand, in the hospital, but you know, I don't expect nothing from you, man."

"Can I tell you a secret that everybody knows, Lovely Rita?"

"Shoot."

"I'm a nerd. As such, I can't help but be attracted to the other members of my species. Hence the Iron Maidens. Of whom you must be the absolute queen. A girl like you writes me erotic e-mails, and I make a mess of my keyboard. When I print them out, I get all the pages welded together. And do you know how long you can go in LA without seeing a real pair of tits, on a real woman, who's never had anything nipped tucked, peeled, enhanced, remodeled, or rescupltured? Rita, I decided I didn't want to die, because I owe my life, my body and my soul to all my Iron Maidens, in some sense, but to you? Lovely Rita? My Lady Madonna? My debt is literal. If I ever find the balls to become Tony Stark, again, I'll give you the world. But right now, all I've got is what's in my balls. It's not exactly the world, but I didn't have a reason to live before you showed up and made me realize there was something left to live for. The girl who writes me the erotic letters. In purple text. High tower font. 11 point. That might not seem to be much. But it's meant the difference between life and death to me." Tony replied.

"I'm up to the responsibility, Tony. I can take it. My back is strong. I can carry you on it for a long, long time. As long as you need me to."

"How old are you, Rita?"

"Twenty-two."

"Amazing."

"Not really, Tony. Age has nothing to do with it. I'm a woman, a real woman. Unfortunately for you, you fell in love with a real cunt."

"It's what I deserve."

"Nobody gets what they deserve, _El Cabron_. They get what they get. How did you know it was me, writing those letters?" Rita asked.

"I saw a text on a Word 2003 window open on your laptop. Even though I was lying in bed, close to death, my heart leapt. Among other things." Tony confessed.

"So, you liked them that much? My letters?"

"Like them? Christ, I waited for another one of those! Lovely Rita, you are the Princess of Perverts, the Empress of Erotomaniacs. Our Lady of Lustful Longing. Never has a woman been so eloquently and shamelessly been possessed of such a dirty, degenerate obsession with a man she could seemingly never have. I however, unlike other men in my position, cowards all, was not frightened by such a display. I was honored. Flattered. Intrigued. Inflamed."

Tony faltered, his mind reaching for a further turn of phrase.

"And encouraging. I have a friend who wrote two or three letters to someone in the X-Men I won't name, but he shoots lasers out of his eyes. You know what she got in reply? A restraining order."

"Scott has no dick. I know. I've been his old lady's friend with benefits since 1982. Or was it 1980? Anyway, tell your friend to write to Beast, or Wolverine, instead. If she puts a return address on the envelope, Hank with write back to her and try to arrange a date. Logan will show up on her doorstep with a case of beer, and a pizza. In a clean shirt, with his hair combed, and he'll take his hat off, call her ma'am, move her couch for her and punch out her ex-boyfriend. In addition to the obvious. As for me, as I recall, right before I left on my ruinous journey, I sent an envelope to the PO box of my secret admirer containing a lock of my hair, a pair of dirty boxer shorts in a Ziploc baggie, and the most eloquently filthy letter I could think of. And I didn't seal the envelope by licking it."

"You're really a filthy bastard." Rita replied, fondly.

"I am? Who's been giving me a bath with a happy ending even before I could walk?"

"Who put me in a naughty nurse outfit when he was at death's door? I think it was the same pervert who was feeling me up every time I gave him a bath, even before he could walk. Not to mention you've been completely capable of bathing yourself for a month."

"True. But where would the fun in that be? You know, Rita, we've been talking and texting and teasing each other more than enough. For fuck's sake, I had to remove the High Tower font from all my computers, and ban anyone I employed from using it, because every time I saw high tower font, I got this raging hard-on. I two hundred percent stand by every dirty, nasty, filthy thing I wrote that I wanted to do to you. This is fate, Rita. It's synchronicity… its…it's time for us shut up and fuck, that's what time it is."

"I'm all for the fucking part, but do we have to shut up?"

"I never do. I must warn you, Rita. I start out a talker and end up a screamer. And I have this unfortunate tendency to come like a fountain. You don't mind, do you?"

In that she walked over and pulled his sweatpants down, Tony figured it was alright.

He had wanted to _commence l'affaire_ by absolutely nailing Rita to his hospital bed, while she was still in the nurse uniform, but doing it several times over in the hospitals parking lot with the windows of the Vanagon wide open, despite the fact it was snowing out, was just as good.

* * *

><p>Tony was sound asleep when he was awakened by something ringing, under his head.<p>

It was Rita's cell phone, but he knew the number on the Caller ID.

"Hello?"

"Howard?"

"Are you having fun yet, Tony?"

"Actually, I had a lot of fun in the beginning, The first six months. After that it all got very much like a William Burroughs novel. Which are only entertaining when you're not living them. How did you get this number? This is my, uh, my nurse, Rita's, cell phone?"

"I'm Howard Stark. When I want something, I get it. Yesterday. Where the hell are you? Why haven't you called? When are you coming home?"

"I really lost my mind, Howard. I'm coming home after I get my shit together."

"You've got six months, kiddo. Then Flynn and I are coming after you."

"How are you going to find me? Because I've blocked the GPS signature of this telephone, and all the other devices I'm using."

"That's for me to know and you not to find out. Now, I want you to call me every Thursday at two-thirty in the afternoon. Pacific time. I gave this number to Captain Rogers, and to Dr. Grey and to Ms. Potts and Flynn. I'm sure they'll be in touch."

"What if I didn't want…"

"Hell, Tony, you're half-mad. You don't know what you want."

**New York City, 2002. **

**IV: Sasha**

The phone rang, and when Natasha Romanov saw that it said "Castle" on the Caller ID, and the Las Vegas area code, she dove for the phone.

"Did you find him? Is Tony dead?"

"We found him. He's alive. Crazy as a shithouse rat, but alive. I'm giving him six more months to get his act together, and then his stepfather and I are going to get him, and kidnap him, if we have to."

Sasha caught a sob in her throat.

"I am so sorry, Mr. Stark. I did not realize. I did not know…"

"It's not your fault, Ms. Romanov. Now, I've got some people to call and some things to do, so, I'll be going."

Howard Stark hung up the phone.

Natasha sat there, holding the phone for so long that Clint came and took it out of her hands.

"He said I was killing him, Clint. How could I just go?"

"Because you had to. How did you know he'd do something like this?"

"When he comes back to New York, I will go and talk to him."

Clint smiled, sadly, and shook his head.

"Nat, you still don't get it. Tony was right about one thing. You're just too young to understand."

"You're only five years older than me! What, when I turn thirty, a light will go off in head and suddenly, every crazy thing Tony said will come clear."

"Something like that." He replied.

**Argentina, Six months later**

"_Adios, amigos!_"

"_Adios, El Cabron_!"

Fuelled with liquid good cheer, that crazy gringo, who they called The Bastard, roughly translated, staggered barefoot into the street.

He had no shoes on, because he had left his shoes at home, again, and the pair of dirty Levis he was wearing were one of three pair of pants he owned.

The other two were the two pairs of sweatpants he wore in the hospital.

The Bastard pulled his ragged Baja sweater on over one of six tee shirts he owned, four of which Rita had bought and he had worn while in the hospital, and ran his hand through his long black hair, and then his long black beard.

He leaned against the wall as he walked home.

Tony, sporting one of those heathered, faded retro-look Led Zeppelin tee shirts under his baja, was whistling the riff from _Kashmir_ as he idly pissed on the wall of Rita's apartment building.

She came out on her balcony, in a pair of women's boxer shorts and a Who tee shirt.

"Tony, what are jou doing?"

"Pissing. Then I'm going home."

"That is a camper. Home is up here. With me. Did you eat, since this morning?"

"No."

"Well, come on, then."

Tony let Rita lead him in.

As soon as they were upstairs, and in her bedroom, Tony tried to kiss her, and she pushed him away.

"Not yet. Jou need a bath, Tony. First you take a bath."

"I thought you liked it, when I'm in dirty coveralls, covered in motor oil. And I put the coveralls in the camper."

"At the garage? Yeah. On my sheets? Not so much."

"I'm hungry."

"Bath, now. Food, later."

Tony took a long bath, washed his hair and his beard and combed them out.

Rita came in, and she wanted to cut his hair, trim his beard close to his chin.

Like Tessa's mother used to do.

For Howard.

"Don't, Rita."

"Okay, Tony. Have it your way."

She walked towards the door.

"Where are you going?"

"To cook. And put the laundry in."

"Rita, you are my savior. My Madonna. And you look like one, too. Don't go, yet."

He reached for her and she came willingly to his arms.

"So, now I get my usual payment, for taking good care of you?"

"I have so much money. When I get back to it, I'll buy you whatever you want."

"This is what I want, Tony. You."

* * *

><p>After Sasha left him, Tony sailed off on a schooner hardly bigger than a sailboat, telling everyone he'd be home in a month or two.<p>

That was two years ago.

Or something like it.

He'd been all over the world, and had done all sorts of wonderful, awful things, somewhere along the line losing the _Tesla_, and just about everything else.

He ended up a bum in the street, somewhere, Argentina, maybe, tangled hair, long greasy beard, uncut, long, cracked fingernails, the whole bit.

After he got out of the hospital, he cut his nails and trimmed his hair in his beard to what he liked to think of as his Jim Morrison in Mexico look, when he arrived in Rita's little town by the sea.

Tony had been there six months.

On weekends, he and Rita went sailing on a leaky, creaky, aged fishing boat he had bought from the salvage yard, and painstakingly restored.

It looked a lot like the boat Robert Shaw had, in _Jaws_, so he re-christened it the _Captain Quint_.

Tony had a mind to go home, someday, but he never quite got around to it.

In the morning, on his way to the garage, Tony stopped at the bar he drank at, and fixed the ice machine.

The owner gave him a bottle of cheap tequila and a few pesos for his trouble.

He put in five or six hours at the garage.

One of his customers had no money to pay him with, so he took a bag of weed in lieu of cash, and went back to his camper to smoke it, as Rita did not allow drugs in her apartment.

How could he do it?

Go back to the States.

He had no money, and he couldn't find his Passport.

And what would happen to the _Captain Quint_?

Rita said it his Passport must be in the camper; she would keep looking.

Tony abided with Rita, wrecked and ruined and broken down, in her village by the sea.

He was abiding, one afternoon when he had no work to do, barefoot and bare-chested, in his Levis, in the back of the van with a bag of weed, a bag of peyote and a couple of bottles of tequila.

Tony was somewhere in-between memory and a dream when the softly air-conditioned cocoon of drawn shades and faint rays of sunlight, humming quietly along to the tune of the Rolling Stones was rudely interrupted by a blast of hot air, and Rita coaxing him into the harsh sunlight.

"Tony, both of these guys, they say they're your father. Can I come with you, to America?" she asked.

Tony blinked, and absently drummed his fingers on the glowing blue disc in the middle of his chest.

Wait.

Both of these guys?

Tony rubbed his eyes, until he could see again.

"Flynn, are you crazy? What did you bring Howard to South America for?"

"Flynn didn't bring me. I brought myself. Flynn brought himself, too. Now, that's just about enough of this shit, Tony. You're coming back to the States." Howard told him.

"What if I don't want to?"

Howard Stark angrily took his orange scented Germ-X from his pocket, squirted a great deal of it onto his hands, and rubbed them together, vigorously.

He took a step towards his son, who he was four inches taller than, and glowered down at him.

"You'll go and you'll like it, even if Flynn has to brain you! Aww, the hell with it, I'll brain you, myself!"

Flynn stepped between them.

"Nobody's going to brain, anyone. My dear, you've taken good care of Tony. Of course you can come back to the States with us. Now, I'll just call Colonel Fury, and arrange transportation for Tony's vehicle, and we'll all get in the Range Rover and fight like civilized people on the way to the S.H.I.E.L.D airfield in Buenos Aries. We've got about four hours to drive, so we can sort it all out."

"But I don't have my Passport. And there's the _Captain Quint_." Tony protested.

"That's his boat."

"Ship, Rita."

"I can't leave her, Flynn."

"I understand, my boy. When I speak to Nick, I'll arrange transportation for the _Captain Quint,_ too."

"I have it his passport. And your wallet, Tony. And your last two thousand American dollars you told me to hold onto. I also have my passport, and I can pack and be ready to go in about an hour. Just let me have a few minutes to call my aunt in Los Angeles." Rita told Tony

"We're going to Las Vegas, Senorita." Howard helpfully told her.

"Okay. I'll stay with Tony for awhiile, then. You're going to need me, huh?"

"Definitely." Tony finally spoke up.

"You listen, _El Cabron_, I'm leaving my home for you, and my country. You had better not be bullshitting me about getting me into USC for my post-graduate work."

She was smiling when she said it, though, but Tony got a worried look on his face.

"I'm only fooling. I'd go and live in the slums in Rio in this fucking camper with you, if that's what jou wanted. I'd even live on that old wreck of a ship. You know me, Tony. I'm crazy."

"You must be, to stick with me."

Howard broke in.

"I'll say she is! Miss, don't you worry about a thing. Even if my son is too lazy and too drunk and too high to give you anything but what he's got between his legs, I'll make sure you're set for life, for what you've done for him. And that's a goddamn and that's a promise. You know, kid, you kind of remind me of a Latina Jane Russell. There aren't enough girls who look like you in the picture business, anymore. Did you ever think about going into show business?"

Howard began leading Rita to the car.

"Flynn, is it just me, or is he hitting on my girl?"

"I think so. She seems like a smart girl, Tony. You had better get a shave and a haircut, pull your socks up, and make her a better offer."

**Las Vegas, 2003**

Everything went so fast.

For one thing, he fell asleep in the Range Rover, and he was hardly awake as, clutching his duffle bag, Rita hustled him into the Arrow, which Howard had actually got built, the crazy bastard.

They were back in Vegas before Tony had a chance to blink, and Rita and Flynn were now hustling him into another black car, a Lincoln, and Tony hardly had a minute to protest that Howard shouldn't drive before they were gone.

He was on the phone the whole time, barking to some underlings about having Tony's usual suite ready, and when they got to the secret entrance, Howard's private entrance, the door into an underground corridor about a city block from the Stark Hotel and Casino, there was a flunky with a wheelchair, waiting.

"Go and park the car, Watkins. And call my personal doctor. Hell, call all of my doctors. I want them here, ten minutes ago. And get Dr. Grey here. Come on, son, get in the wheelchair. Flynn, you had better phone Colonel Fury and Captain Rogers and Miss Potts. Watkins, I want a lid on this so tight a fart can't escape. And call the MORC and get my shrink, here, too. You come with us, Rita. Tony needs you."

"Should I push the chair, Mr. Stark?"

"I don't need a wheelchair, Howard! I'm well. I've been well for months."

"No. He's my Frankenstein. I made the boy what he is. Damn my bad leg, I'll push the son of a bitch. As for you, kid, you'll get in this wheelchair and like it! I don't trust whatever cheap, lousy, third-rate doctors you went to as far as I can throw them."

"Howard?"

"Yes, Tony?"

"I have the sudden urge for a cheeseburger. With bacon on it. And fries."

Howard Stark stopped in the corridor and pushed a button on the wall, signaling his chef.

"Welcome back, Mr. Stark. Is the other Mr. Stark with you?"

"He is. And he'll have the usual."

Rita had to run to catch up, as Howard sped down the corridor.

"Tony, how the hell did you modify my design for the Arrow to use on the engine on a 1975 Volkswagen?"

"I'll show you when it gets here."

**IV: Pepper**

Pepper had received three telephone calls from Tony.

One in 2001, one this year.

She got a card on her birthday, at Christmas, and on Secretary's Day.

And the phone call from the hospital in Argentina.

That was all she'd heard from Tony in two years.

Jean Grey got two birthday cards, and about eight months ago, a call from Tony from said hospital, asking her to send, express mail, several cases of anti-malarials, and he'd pay her back when he saw her, calmly explaining that the hospital he was in was all out, not expecting another delivery for a month, and that by then, he and some of the other malaria patients would surely be dead.

No one else heard from Tony, at all.

The fourth call came from the cell phone belonging to Grant Castle, AKA Howard Stark.

"Did you find him, Howard? Is the stupid bastard alive?"

"He's alive. But he's not taking all this at all well. Could you please be here? Now? Or close to now?"

Pepper was in the lobby of the Stark Hotel and Casino, she had been working for Howard while Tony was gone.

Much of the time, on following Tony's trail.

They were both crazy, but Howard's insanity was far more manageable.

"I'll be right up, Mr. Stark." She promised.

Her phone rang again as she was on her way to the elevator.

It was Tony's stepfather, telling her that he was home.

When she arrived at the door, with the customary _BAMF!_, Jean Grey and Nightcrwaler appeared.

"Should I come with you, Jean?"

"I don't think so, Kurt. I've seen Tony and Mr. Castle doing their tag-team nut act, together. It's not pretty. I will call you."

Another _BAMF!_, and Jean and Pepper stood together, in front of the door.

"Why are you throwing those down the shaft for the fucking incinerator? Howard! Those are my clothes!"

"Clothes? Those aren't clothes! That shit was rags not fit for a drunken bum! And probably chock full of mutated, antibiotic-resistant, goddam South American superbugs! Now, go take a goddam shower and let the nice girl who takes care of you give you a shave and a haircut!"

"Why don't you ask Rita to burn her clothes?"

"Because she neither looks nor smells like a goddamn trustafarian stewbum! And use my soap."

Jean and Pepper looked at each other.

"You want to go down to the bar and have a drink, first?" Jean asked.

"I'm buying." Pepper agreed.

**V: Tony **

It took Tony a month to quit having panic attacks as soon as he left the Casino, and even at that, he refused to go to the MORC if Rita couldn't come with him.

He was at the MORC for two months, following which he returned to Los Angeles.

As it turned out, his father was right.

He had been having regular reoccurrences of the malaria, and he had to have a few courses of the latest anti-malarial treatments to fully eradicate the disease from his system.

Tony did not return to his mansion in Malibu, after he got his clean bill of health, although he did go back to work.

He lived on the _Captain Quint_, at the Pier 44 Marina, and parked his camper at Rita's.

He bought Rita a little house in Laurel Canyon and a Subaru Outback, sport model, and filled both with all the trappings, quite over her objections.

When he felt like living on dry land, that was where he went, and when he didn't, Rita braved the _Captain Quint._

Tony also gave Rita the loft he had once lived in at the brownstone in the Village where he had grown up, and when he was in New York, he stayed there, with her, at first.

It was as if Tony had to ease back into his life again, like he was squeezing himself back into an old pair of pants that didn't quite fit, yet.

It was few weeks before he got back to work at Stark Enterprises, and probably another month or so before he was back in the suit, but, six months after he had returned to the States, and a year after he had been released from the Catholic charity hospital in Argentina, both Tony Stark and Iron Man were back to work, again.

He finally moved back into his Malibu mansion and his penthouse atop Stark Tower in New York after he had been back from Argentina for about six months, but he still did not buy himself a new ship.

The _Captain Quint_ was good enough for him.

Just when Tony thought that all was well, however, disaster came on swift wings.

On a sunshiny day in New York, sitting outside a pizzeria in Brooklyn.

And then, she was there.

The flash of blue light from his chest nearly blinded Tony, and he felt as though his heart had exploded into a million tiny pieces.

"Tony! I'm so glad to see you. I never meant for so much bad things to happen to you. I have so much to tell you. Do you mind if I sit down?"

"I'm sorry, Sasha. But you can't."

"Why?"

Tony sighed.

"You're still too young to understand what I'm about to tell you, but I'm going to say it anyway. In such a way you won't forget it when you are old enough to understand. I know you didn't mean to hurt me, but you did. I don't think anything that has ever happened to me, since I saw my mother die, hurt as much as the way you just left me. It broke me. I lost my mind, I lost my way, I went on a binge of epic proportions that nearly cost me my life, that it has taken me another year to recover from. But none of that matters, because I still love you, Sasha. I will die still loving you. Because of that, I can't be your casual buddy, or your friend with benefits, or anything else. If you ever loved me, get up, and go. Remember when I told you, don't come back, unless you mean it? Well, you still don't get it, and you still don't mean it. If you get into trouble, and you need to he helped or saved, my offer still stands. I'll do it. I'd do anything for you, Sasha. But, just seeing you is making me feel like cutting the arc reactor out of my chest with this plastic knife. If you won't go, I'll do it. Right before your horrified eyes. Please, listen to me, this time. Don't come back until you mean it. And if you don't mean it, don't come back, at all."

Sasha didn't say anything, and if she was going to cry, she waited until after she had gone, to do it.

Tony didn't watch her go.

A few minutes later, Rita came out with their pizza.

"Jou don't look so good, Tony. What happened while I was in there?"

"I saw a ghost. And it was me. Never mind, don't listen to me, I'm crazy. Let's eat."

**Los Angeles, California. Chateau Marmont, 2010 **

**Postscript: Sasha**

Tony was asleep, and he had been asleep for about an hour, and he had earned his rest, well.

Sasha felt sleepy, and happy, but she was enjoying the peaceful, blissful feeling of total physical satisfaction, and this fleeting, perfect moment of feeling safe and happy and quiet and loved.

She didn't want to go to sleep, and miss it, and hugged Tony tighter.

Sasha hadn't intended to wake him up, but she had.

"I love you too, Sasha, but you're squeezing the rib that I broke fighting your ex-boyfriend for my life."

"I love you, Tony. I love you too much. It frightens me. I never loved a man the way I love you. It's no good for you. For me, either."

"Is that the real reason you left me?"

"Mostly. But the other things I said, they are true, also."

"You're such a cold, calculating, selfish bitch, Sasha. You really are a Black Widow. But I'm a much bigger bastard than you could ever be a bitch. So it doesn't bother me."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"It does, doesn't it? So, after my birthday, if things go the way you seem to think they will, at the next Avengers meeting, I'll propose you for membership, and you can get your special gang tattoo."

"Don't you think there might be trouble?"

"I won't give Clint any trouble. And he's such an arrogant SOB, he thinks he's the top dog and I'm just nostalgia, so he won't give me any trouble. Doesn't bother me."

"Can I ask you one thing?"

"Name it."

"Stop making fuck movies."

"But Sasha, I was going to ask you if you wanted to make them with me?"

"Clint would shoot you."

"Not fatally. Come on. We'll make just one. It'll be my swan song. We'll wait until there's been a big announcement that the Black Widow is joining the Avengers, and that she and Iron Man are a couple. Until the perfect moment when we're getting all this press, and the media is in a feeding frenzy. But this time, it won't be just a YouTube clip. I've always wanted to make a celebrity sex tape. Something legendary. To rival Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson. And I can only think of one woman I would want to do it with. I'll write a script, and hire a director, and we'll make it look professional but amateur. And we can both be shocked and appalled when it's released, of course."

"What for?"

"So that out love might be immortal, and live for eternity, of course. Like Romeo and Juliet. Or Tristram and Isolde. You're a beautiful woman, Sasha, and you've got a real, natural, cinematic talent for fucking. You're like a wild animal, you're so dirty and sexy and insatiable and you say the mot divinely filthy things while I'm doing things to you that most men only dream of doing. I want the whole world to see you the way I do, and I want them all to be jealous, and want you and hate me. When every member of the opposite sex in the known universe wants to fuck your brains out, and every time you walk down the street you can feel them looking at you, and you know you could have any one of them you wanted, it's an amazing feeling. It's like being a God. An Avatar. The Avatar of Fuck. I want to share that experience with you, Sasha. I can't really give you the Moon and the strs in the heavens. But I can make you a Goddess, fit to travel among them."

"Tony, you're a madman. And a megalomaniac. Everything Vanya said about you is true."

"That I'm the Devil?"

"You may not be the Devil, but you are a Devil. My Devil. And you know me too well. One time. Clint gets mad at me, he says I am born bad, that I have red hair because I have Devil in me, that he does not know if I am Kali or Whore of Babylon or both. I tell him definitely both. Of course I make movie with you."

Never in her life had Sasha been so madly in love with Tony as she was at that moment.

And never had she wanted him, or any other man, so much.

He rolled over so that they were belly to belly, again.

"Maybe you didn't do it for months…"

"Listen Sasha, my divine Whore of Babylon, my demon lover Kali, my immortal goddess of Sex and the Death of my enemies. What would you do for your birthday, if you knew it might be your last?"

"Whatever I wanted."

"I was hoping you'd say that."

At that moment, Sasha really believed that Tony Stark was a Devil, and that she had given him her soul, and was damned, for all time.

And in that same, wonderful, terrible moment, she didn't care.


End file.
